Facebook has just lost one of the games it planned to start testing Oculus Quest ads. Facebook announced last week that they'd begin rolling out ads in Oculus Quest in three games, including Blaston by Resolution Games. The ads would be targeted based on a players Facebook profile, with the social media giant assuring players that the Quest was not secretly recording their game sessions to generate ad suggestions.
As you'd expect, the move wasn't exactly well-received. Nobody likes ads (just ask Take-Two about NBA 2K21) as they waste the player's time for a blatant cash grab, which feels particularly bad after shelling out the money for a VR setup.
Resolution Games must have realized the poor optics of a premium VR title playing ads for its players, and has wisely decided to remove Blaston from Facebook's Oculus ad plan.
"After listening to player feedback, we realize that Blaston isn’t the best fit for this type of advertising test. Therefore, we no longer plan to implement the test," Resolution Games wrote on Blaston's official Twitter account today.
"To make it clear, we realize that Blaston isn’t the best fit for this type of advertising test. As an alternative, we are looking to see if it is feasible to move this small, temporary test to our free game, Bait! sometime in the future."
Free-to-play games already have advertising (at least on mobile), so there's likely to be less of a backlash from fans of Bait!. As a premium title, Blaston players expect their game to remain blessedly free of advertisements at least for the time being.
Facebook is still moving forward with ads on Oculus Quest. The company rolled out ads in the Oculus app last month and two companies are still taking part in the Quest advertising test, although those two companies have yet to be identified.
Frankly, the only good video game advertisements were made by John Romero back in the '90s, but this State of Survival mobile ad comes pretty close.