The Oculus name may be no more, but there is at least one piece of good news in Facebook's decision to rebrand itself as Meta. You won't need a Facebook account to use its Quest headsets. That tidbit of information was nestled in a post from soon-to-be Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth detailing what the rebranding means for the company's various products.
"We’re working on new ways to log into Quest that won’t require a Facebook account, landing sometime next year," Bosworth said. "This is one of our highest priority areas of work internally."
Meta announced in August 2020 it would eventually require all Oculus owners to log into their devices with a Facebook account. At the time, the company said people it would start prompting people to merge their Oculus and Facebook accounts starting in October 2020. Under that plan, Oculus owners would have had until January 1st, 2023 to continue using their headsets without a Facebook account. After that point, Meta said the devices would continue working, but warned some games and apps would not. Unsurprisingly, the Oculus community immediately hated the decision. "What the ****," said one of the more tame comments an Oculus owner posted in the comments section of the blog post detailing the policy change.