While I enjoyed a week of rest and relaxation away from VR and AR (and, most of the time, WiFi), there was still plenty of news during 2021’s first week of summer. In the newsletter’s last installment, I covered Facebook’s first foray into advertising inside VR games. Those plans quickly changed: Resolution Games, developers of the multiplayer VR title Blaston, pulled back from using that game as the first testbed for Facebook’s new ads.
Lest we take this as a sign that VR ads are dead on arrival, Resolution will instead be testing out these ads in Bait!, a free fishing game. Backlash and backpedaling always grab attention, so I’m curious to see if Facebook’s test will fly under the radar now that we have been through the Blaston news cycle.