A Facebook effort to place ads in virtual reality games has encountered a setback: The VR title Blaston is dropping out from the plan.
The title’s developer Resolution Games announced the decision on Monday following some backlash from customers.
“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,” the developer said in a tweet.
Last week, Facebook announced it was going to test the VR-based ads in Blaston, a $9.99 shooting game available for the company’s Oculus Quest headset. The test was only going to occur on a small scale. Nevertheless, many Blaston gamers opposed the upcoming test, which sparked debate about the need for VR-based advertising in the developer’s chat channel on Discord.
“I paid for a game without ads,” wrote one user. “I should have that game without ads.”
“Look this might all be fine, but knowing Facebook this will be the same as the very expensive smart TVs that have ads in their menus,” wrote another user. “The only thing this testing can lead to is such a snowball effect.”
In its defense, Resolution Games said the VR-based ads could help the Swedish company generate additional revenue to fund game development.
“Ads —if done right— can be a good thing for games and could mean devs like us bringing more and better content to players for much less or even free in the future,” the developer said in a post on Discord. Meanwhile, other Blaston players posted that the ads would be appropriate for a free game, but not for a paid VR title.
The user feedback prompted Resolution Games to change its plans for the VR-based ads. “Some good points have been made, and we realize that Blaston isn’t the best fit for this type of advertising test,” the developer wrote on the Discord channel on Monday.
However, Resolution Games isn’t bowing out from the Facebook-powered VR ads entirely. “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,” the developer said in a separate tweet.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the company has said two other unnamed developers will also be involved in the upcoming test.
