Last I heard it requires a Meta account now. Which is a totally different thing because it has a different name.

It is different in the sense that you can sign up for it without having a Facebook account and actually not have them connected at all. It's good enough for me. What was not good enough was having your Messenger friends randomly inside your VR headset, and that has been fixed.

Then I think I'm not interested.

If I need to have a Meta account to enjoy this, it can stay on a shelf.

Out of curiosity, why? AFAIK, Oculus has always required an account of some kind. The Meta account is separate from your facebook.com one, so it doesn't seem any riskier than an Oculus Account of yore.

The backend is still centered around your legal full name. They allow display names to be displayed, but people are getting their legal name still tied and occasionally shown on that meta Meta account.

I personally bet the old Oculus Accounts were also correlated to a user's Facebook/Instagram/etc. accounts using metadata such as IP address. I guess making it explicit using Meta Accounts does give them more leniency with data linking though.

Same here. I have an O.G. Oculus Rift that's essentially a brick on my shelf now, because I won't create a Meta account. It was bad enough I had to create an Oculus account, but this is a bridge too far.

You should not need to have an account on a server somewhere in order to use what is essentially a computer peripheral. I would not use a mouse or monitor that required an online account.

I understand the Quest is different, and a bit more than a peripheral, so an account maybe maybe maybe is justified. But I won't buy one of them either because Meta.

I'm sure you adhere to those same principles when being forced to use steam for steamvr aswell.

Steam isn't in the business of violating my privacy and shoving me ads.

Everytime you open Steam it literally has a popup window of an ad

Turn the ad off via the settings.

Settings->Interface->Notify me about additions or changes[...]

Same page also has another option for defaulting to library, community tab, friends, profile - instead of the store.

Create a John Smith account like everyone else.

There were two potential concerns about accounts and one of them has been resolved:

1. Requiring an FB account resulted in users who were banned on FB not being able to use their Quests. This has been resolved since users only need a Meta account now.

2. Concerns about having any account with Meta. I doubt this will ever change since they're selling the headsets at such a low price and obviously want to make some money selling users software/games.