All you need to know about the new Meta Quest login

Meta’s first step towards creating a new unified ID system. So has anything actually changed and if so, what exactly?

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Tale of an old promise

When Oculus was acquired in 2014, its founder, Palmer Luckey, famously guaranteed that his company would not force its users to login with Facebook. At the time, it just didn’t make any sense. Virtual reality headsets are hardware units, just like computer monitors or audio speakers. You do not need to use Facebook or any other social network to switch your computer screen on, people reasoned, so why would you need one to access a HMD?

Fast-forward to August 2020. Palmer Luckey is no longer part of Oculus nor has he been for some time now. Facebook makes a low-key announcement via a blog post titled “A single way to log into Oculus and unlock social features“. It states that come October 2020, all-new Quest users will have to use Facebook to access VR and if they don’t have an account, they’ll have to create one. This generated massive backlash, accusations of broken promises, requests for refunds and attempts at class action lawsuits followed. And even though the dust eventually settled, the FB login issue kept coming back, haunting Oculus each time their parent company suffered any kind of controversy, each time there was a…