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Comment by nickthegreek | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue with this announcement is that Blaston isn't a free game. Its a game that you pay for and it will now also shows you ads.

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I think this is the bigger issue. It's the double-dipping from both ends — getting money from the consumer and getting more money from advertisers. It's like cable television all over.

Why can't they: 1. Be less greedy 2. Raise the price so I can be guaranteed to see no ads

It would be even better if they didn't leverage their success in one industry (advertising) by publicly posing solely as another kind of company (social media) in order to buy up other companies (Oculus) to make a lateral entrance into VR, an industry unrelated from advertising, just to pollute it with more advertising.

This whole thing is shady IMO from top to bottom and just another aspect of 2021 tech which makes me think we really collectively failed to prevent the wonder of computing from just being another instrument to extract capital from the people and give it to the powerful

Based on the accounts in The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality[1], I don’t get the feeling Facebook had to “pose solely as another kind of company”. By the point Oculus was in conversations to sell to Facebook, their shadiness was already a concern.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34017056-the-history-...

Or have two price points, one ad-free and one ad-supported

That's a totally fair point, but the argument to that is "don't support this developer" not "sell your Oculus Quest". Getting mad at Oculus for this is basically like getting mad at Apple because developers are including ads in their paid apps.

So who should you get mad at then? Every single app developer?

That developer can probably hardly care less that I don't support them. Either the app is good enough that people will endure the ads (in which case they will always preser two revenue streams to one) or the app is not good enough in which case people will stay away on their own.

The incentive alignment is pretty clear: if Facebook and users let them, devs will show ads.

> So who should you get mad at then?

Developers who do the thing you don't like.

> Every single app developer?

No, just the ones who do the thing you don't like.

> The incentive alignment is pretty clear: if Facebook and users let them, devs will show ads.

Google and Apple pays devs show ads. Therefore all games have ads, right? No.

I don't buy games with ads. I have plenty of options.

> Either the app is good enough that people will endure the ads (in which case they will always preser two revenue streams to one)

Again you're arguing that all games that can have ads, do have ads. This is proven wrong by the world. We have two gigantic app stores with 5 million apps between them. None of the apps on my phone have ads.

I totally agree with you, though it's important to remember that ship sailed long ago.

You pay for a TV, and it shows you ads. You pay for a train ticket, and the walls and platforms are plastered with ads. You buy the fancy surround sound option in your car, and it plays ads. You buy a magazine, and it's mostly ads. And so on and so on. Our entire world has been taken over by ads.

I think it's important to recognize this not so we let FB / Oculus off the hook, but so we can see it's an enormous problem overall that needs to be addressed.

Yeah, I wouldn't put this as "the ship sailed long ago" because this implies resignation. However, this stuff will just keep getting worse.

They should focus on giving Blaston depth, but that’s a different discussion.

Just like TV. Remember that?

They're also basically captive eyeballs. We've never had an ad you literally could not look away from. You can't even look at something else while the ad plays; you'd need to take off the headset and put it back on a minute later, repeat for every ad.

Closing your eyes is an option.

Really? You buy an expensive VR headset to... not use it?

Also, not sure, but isn't there eye-tracking built-in? If yes, the headset could actually detect that you're closing your eyes and keep the ad there until you open them again.

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