Facebook recently took the VR world by storm when it announced plans to experiment with in-game advertising within the popular Oculus Quest game Blaston. But amidst the harsh blowback to the decision, the game developer Resolution Games has decided to pull the $10 game from Facebook’s ongoing ad test program.

“After listening to player feedback, we realize that Blaston isn’t the best fit for this type of advertising test,” Resolution Games explained on Twitter. “Therefore, we no longer plan to implement the test.”

Facebook had announced last week that it would begin displaying in-headset new virtual reality ads starting with Blaston. However, the players of the head-to-head dueling game released in 2020 responded negatively as the game amassed a ton of negative reviews on both the Oculus store and Steam.

Numerous users presented the argument that they had already paid for the game, and the concept of in-game ads is conventionally relevant for free-to-play games.

“Remove the ads or give us our money back,” stated an Oculus reviewer.

“[A] spectacularly bad move,” wrote another one.

“Blaston is getting uninstalled forever, and I’m not gonna buy a single game from this company from now on,” a third one said.

Ever since the VR company was acquired by Facebook back in 2014, its management has been a constant source of controversy.

From the perspective of Resolution Games, the studio is looking to shift the advertising experiments to its free-to-play fishing game called Bait! While ads are always a nuisance for the players, it’s a bit less likely to become as big of trouble as Blaston.

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