Abrupt Exit Of First VR Gaming Partner Lands Facebook's Huge Investments In A Soup: FT
- Facebook Inc’s (NASDAQ: FB) first advertising partner in its virtual reality (VR) headset exited in less than a week after a backlash from the gaming community, the Financial Times reports.
- Last Wednesday, Facebook announced its plans to start testing advertising in its VR gaming headset Oculus, with commercials running in the shooting game Blaston and a couple of other developers.
- But Blaston, a title from Resolution Games, discarded the plan on Monday, following a flood of user complaints.
- Multiple users posted one-star reviews of Blaston in protest against the proposed test with Facebook for suddenly bombarding paid-for game users with ads.
- The headset wearers would have controls to hide particular ads or hide ads from a specific advertiser, Facebook stated last week.
- Facebook announced in May that it had started testing advertisements in the Oculus mobile app.
- Facebook has invested billions of dollars with 10,000 people working across virtual and augmented reality, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated at the VivaTech conference last week.
- Facebook’s AR competitors include Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Snap Inc (NYSE: SNAP).
- Later on Monday, Blaston tweeted that Resolution Games was exploring the feasibility to move the small, temporary test to its free fish-catching game Bait.
- Price action: FB shares traded higher by 0.12% at $332.69 in the premarket session on the last check Tuesday.
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