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The first Facebook partner to advertise on its virtual reality headphones has withdrawn from the initiative less than a week after it was announced following a reaction from the video game community.
The world’s largest social media platform said last Wednesday it was scheduled to begin testing advertising on Oculus, its popular virtual reality game headphones, with commercials in the shooting game Blaston and “a couple more developers.”
But Blaston, a Resolution Games title, abandoned the plan on Monday, after a deluge of user complaints. “After hearing the comments of the players, we realize that Blaston is not the most suitable for this type of advertising tests. Therefore, we no longer plan to implement the test. ” he said on Twitter.
Dozens of users had posted reviews of a star Blaston in protest against the proposed test with Facebook, arguing, for example, that pay-per-view games should not suddenly bombard users with ads, according to media reports.
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on the decision. In last week’s statement, it was said that headset users would have controls to hide specific ads or to hide ads from a particular advertiser.
BlastonFacebook’s decision is embarrassing as it tries to grow its virtual reality business by adding advertising dollars to its hardware revenue. Last month, the company said it had begun testing ads on the Oculus mobile app.
The company has invested heavily in both virtual reality, where headphones block the real world, and augmented reality, where images overlap the real world, taking on Apple and Snap to try to build the next-generation computer platform. All three companies compete to build augmented reality glasses.
At the VivaTech conference last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company now had 10,000 people working in both virtual and augmented reality. “We are investing billions and billions of dollars to build something that we believe will contribute to a compelling future in five to ten years,” he said.
Some players have long rejected the idea of introducing advertising into virtual reality. After selling Oculus to Facebook in 2014 for about $ 2 billion, founder Palmer Luckey said the company could continue to operate autonomously with respect to its new parent company, adding: “We will not track you, ads flash at you, or do anything invasive. “
Later Monday, Blaston said in a tweet that, as an alternative to his test, Resolution Games was “looking to see if it’s feasible to move this small temporary test” to its free fish catch game Left.
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