Don't delete your Oculus Facebook account if you want to keep your games

What you need to know

• When deactivating or deleting a Facebook account, users are warned that their purchased Oculus content is also affected.
• Since users have to log into an Oculus device with a Facebook account, purchased apps and games would also be inaccessible.
• Other companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have the same policies for deleted accounts.

Beginning October 1, 2020, Facebook required all new Oculus users and all Oculus Quest 2 users to log in with a Facebook account before using their Oculus headset. Existing Oculus users are able to merge their Oculus account with their Facebook account, thus bringing all existing purchases over to their Facebook around. As a result, deactivating or deleting a Facebook account with Oculus purchases makes it impossible to access those purchases. This appears to be a similar result as having your Facebook account banned.

Twitter was all atwitter today when folks realized that, indeed deactivating their Facebook account would cause players to lose access to their content. A significant number of folks tweeting about the situation were incensed or otherwise affronted by the idea that deleting a person's Facebook account could result in losing access to content. It seems, from the wording, that deactivating your account just makes your content inaccessible until it is active again.

On the other hand, deleting your account makes it impossible to get a refund for purchased items, and also deletes any store credit you might have had. It's not clear at this time whether or not it's possible to recover access or transfer purchases. We've asked Facebook what players can do if they lose access to their account or deactivate it, and whether or not purchases will be transferrable in such an event. We'll update the story once we have that information.

Looking around at the rest of the gaming industry, however, reveals that this is a common practice. But it's not just the gaming industry that follows this logic though — it's any company that generally deals in digital purchases handled through a digital account. See, your digital account is your digital identity. Without an identity to verify your, well, identity, it's impossible for a company to grant you access to a purchased digital library. Reading the terms of service on Xbox accounts from Microsoft, PlayStation accounts from Sony, or Nintendo accounts will also yield similar language to what Facebook uses on the deactivation page.