Abrupt Exit Of First VR Gaming Partner Lands Facebook's Huge Investments In A Soup: FT

Facebook Inc’s FB first advertising partner in its virtual reality (VR) headset exited in less than a week after a backlash from the gaming community, the Financial Times reports.
Last Wednesday, Facebook announced its plans to start testing advertising in its VR gaming headset Oculus, with commercials running in the shooting game Blaston and a couple of other developers.
But Blaston, a title from Resolution Games, discarded the plan on Monday, following a flood of user complaints.
Multiple users posted one-star reviews of Blaston in protest against the proposed test with Facebook for suddenly bombarding paid-for game users with ads.
The headset wearers would have controls to hide particular ads or hide ads from a specific advertiser, Facebook stated last week.
Facebook announced in May that it had started testing advertisements in the Oculus mobile app.
Facebook has invested billions of dollars with 10,000 people working across virtual and augmented reality, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated at the VivaTech conference last week.
Facebook’s AR competitors include Apple Inc AAPL and Snap Inc SNAP.
Later on Monday, Blaston tweeted that Resolution Games was exploring the feasibility to move the small, temporary test to its free fish-catching game Bait.
Price action: FB shares traded higher by 0.12% at $332.69 in the premarket session on the last check Tuesday.