The big Facebook news today is that it’s changing its company name to Meta, but another bit of interesting information from the Facebook Connect Livestream is that Oculus Quest VR headsets will stop requiring Facebook accounts soon.
“As we’ve focused more on work, and frankly as we’ve heard your feedback more broadly, we’re working on making it so you can log in into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his keynote. “We’re starting to test support for work accounts soon, and we’re working on making a broader shift here, within the next year.”
Right now, you need an active Facebook account in order to set up the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, which became an issue during the massive Facebook outage, preventing anyone from accessing games purchased through the Oculus store. This didn’t stop a teenager who found a way to unlink your Facebook account from a Quest 2, but it’s a little tricky and you do lose out on some of the headset’s functionality.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that despite the company’s new name and focus on the so-called metaverse, “not everyone wants their social media profile linked to all these other experiences.”
There are no details yet on when Quest headsets will start offering alternative login options or what those options will be.