Facebook’s efforts to bring advertising to the Oculus virtual reality platform, which has billions of dollars spent building it, doesn’t seem like a good start.
The company announced last week that it plans to launch its first in-game ads within the Blaston title of prolific VR game developer Resolution Games, and just days later the game studio announced that it had heard from users who have heard it decided to cancel the ad launch.
“After listening to player feedback, we found that Blaston is not the best solution for this type of advertising test,” said a tweet on the Blaston account. “That’s why we’re no longer planning to carry out the test. We look forward to seeing you in the arena and hope you check out the Crackdown update that went live today! “
This potential ad launch was particularly noteworthy as the ads were tested in a third-party title. Facebook has bought a handful of VR studios in the past few months and owns a number of the most popular Quest titles in its marketplace for other developers to open their monetization channels instead of Facebook to do so.
Last week’s announcement still sparked many critics in the VR community who weren’t enthusiastic about Facebook’s wider efforts to balance advertising efforts with user privacy, but other users seemed more annoyed at the prospect of that Ads will appear in a paid title that they had already purchased. Blaston is available from the Oculus Store for $ 9.99.
That Resolution Games abandoned the test before it even began is an early setback to Facebook’s VR advertising efforts, which shows how skeptical the most vocal users of the Oculus platform Facebook still are. In a blog post last week, Facebook attempted early on to address concerns about using user data to serve advertisements in VR, noting in particular that conversations recorded by the headset’s microphone and images captured by the onboard tracking -Cameras were analyzed, would not be used.
Facebook saw significant backlash from virtual reality fans last year when they shared that new headset owners would need a Facebook account to activate their devices. While criticism came after the announcement, the recently released Quest 2 headset has already sold all of Facebook’s previous VR devices together for $ 299, the company said.
We asked Facebook for a comment.