Facebook has announced that it would soon mandate the use of Facebook accounts within its Oculus ecosystem.

What’s the big deal, you may ask? This isn’t the first time a major tech company has tried to combine various services under a “unified account” umbrella. But while Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others have spent years building such empires, none has pulled quite the bait-and-switch as Facebook did yesterday. And it’s not a matter of tech business as usual. Facebook’s latest decision deserves fierce scrutiny, right now, before it explodes like a virus outside of the niche that is virtual reality.

This transition to a Facebook account requirement is unprecedented in consumer electronics. On the gaming side, no console or connected gaming service has ever required its users’ social network (or even its wholly owned email products) to function. (That means you can use Xbox Live without one of Microsoft’s outlook.com addresses.) The exception is the Google Stadia gaming service, which requires a Google account (inherent in a Gmail address), though it launched with this as a requirement, as opposed to making it a requirement later in the product life cycle.

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