Only Select Developers Can Publish Google Daydream Apps Until 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Only Select Developers Can Publish Google Daydream Apps Until 2017

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61 pointsprostoalex58 comments

I encourage developers to wait for a more open platform before jumping on the VR bandwagon.

We don't need Google to curate VR apps for us. The PC did just fine with anyone being able to develop and distribute whatever kind of app they wanted, in fact it created far more business opportunity for developers than mobile ever did. We screwed up when it came to mobile by letting Google and Apple get away with their land grabs. Now we're paying them until the end of time for the privilege of being able to market our own software.

We don't need Google owning and taxing this space as well.

What? The PC didn't do fine with distributing software at all, at least not before Steam came along. On Linux the situation was ok with package managers like apt, but on Windows it was terrible. You basically couldn't buy any games online, you'd have to install from DVD, and every game basically had to implement an inbuilt update/patching system.

Google Play/Steam/iOS App Store may be a tax, but let's not pretend something similar isn't necessary.

For a long time we needed DVDs not just because online installs were not available, but because broadband internet wasn't widely available. It was hardly a nice experience to have to wait 12-24 hours to download a game. Steam was a little ahead of the curve, true.

And regarding updates, the OS makers could just create an official update library that everyone can use. App Stores are just an OS maker powerplay, a cash grab.

> App Stores are just an OS maker powerplay, a cash grab.

Steam is an app store that users and developers choose voluntarily. It provides huge value. App stores are what users and developers want.

Steam is an optional app store. The rest are not.

I buy most of my favorite aaa games in the box, outside of steam. GTA5 was my latest buy. I love having that choice to own something irl.

>App stores are what users and developers want.

There are two sides of the coin, but imo there are far less people benefiting from walled gardens.

> App stores are what users and developers want.

This. As a user since the days of DOS I've always wanted a unified repository for software and updates.

As an amateur developer I want my users to get my stuff from a trusted source and I don't want to host my own servers or update mechanism.

> App stores are what users and developers want. reply

Which parts of app stores? Distribution? Payment processing? Discoverability? Search? DRM? Forced policing of content? Not being able to publish adult or any kind of political content?

Don't make a beginners mistake of mixing people wanting a FEW benefits for ALL the people wanting ALL the properties of a product .

Convenience.

I have been a PC gamer since the early 90s, and being able to buy a game and have it on my PC with the latest patch in a matter of minutes provides enough benefits to make me ignore the downsides.

I certainly do no represent ALL users, but since Steam is so successful (when most games sold there can be bought though alternative means), it is a reasonable assumption that it provides value to many of them.

>App stores are what users and developers want

I as a developer don't care. I was selling software on the web before app stores came around. And update distribution + payment processing wasn't hard. At least not that hard that I'd like to pay 30% of my revenue for.

And users. User don't really "want" app stores. They take them because they are convenient. But my software download and sales volumes didn't change much with app stores. People just switched to the app store from softpedia (or whatever software sites they were using before). There's not more users buying software just because Apple came up with the Mac app store. At least not for my business.

Out of interest, what do you write? Do you sell via the Mac App Store?

Do you see the Windows app store as a success? I recall them having some kind of "get software" section in XP back in the day, yet that died a death.

I remember buying PC Plus every month so I could get the free software on the front. Downloading any software via dialup was horrible, hence all those CDs and DVDs I got.

Steam is a very recent development.

software != games distribution != online distribution

The big PC developer boom happened in the mid-90s, facilitated by Windows 95 and Visual Basic. Anyone who knew a little about coding could put together a product and ship it on CD or floppy disk.

The current fad for app stores has pluses and minuses, but there's no particular advantage for developers in Google limiting access to VR - especially not if that horrendous screen at the top of the article is a good indication of what Google has in mind.

Developers always benefit when marketplaces are open and initial cost of access is low - in money, if not necessarily in time.

So do platforms. It's by far the best way to get a lot of creative software for a relatively small outlay.

> Developers always benefit when marketplaces are open and initial cost of access is low - in money, if not necessarily in time

I don't agree. The open market platform for mobile devices has resulted in a race to the bottom.

Except the market isn't open ? It's a walled garden kept by Apple/Google.

The race to the bottom only happened because there wasn't much differentiation between the apps people were developing. 10 todo apps is plenty, 100 is more than enough, 1000+ is what we had.

That's why people started competing on price. And every business owner/entrepreneur can tell you that competing on price is a game you don't want to be playing.

There's enough successful mobile apps that charge $20+ - but they are not trivial TODO clones but specialized applications.

This is very true. Competing on price is the only solution if you cannot compete on features or value (that is, value of your software to the end user).

The PC developer boom was only big when comparing it to previous state: almost nothing. The mobile has order of magnitude more users (basically everybody on earth) and also developers. Also, no, not everybody could ship a product on a CD or a floppy, distribution of software had huge costs. Unless you consider that giving floppys to your friends as distribution.

Yep. Candy Crush > Baldur's Gate and Deus Ex.

It is not only the number of users but who those users are. PC gamers were always rooted in the geek/it community. And that is why we had the higher quality games there.

It wasn't literally everybody, but there were a surprising number of software companies that got started by mailing out floppy disks or even tapes from the developer's house. I believe Sierra is the one that grew into a big distributor.

DooM sold 3 million copies and was played by 20 million people. And it was shareware.

That's not nothing.

I may have worded that poorly, my logic is:

1. First there was almost nothing, software was confined to labs and huge entreprises, nobody had a computer at home 2. Then the PC boom came and it was big-ish (software had tens of millions to maybe a few hundreds of millions of customers) 3. Mobile "revolution" came and now everybody has a computer (counted in billions)

20 million clients is peanuts compared to the current scale. Which is why the software prices went downhill. There is just too much choice.

What? The whole growth of a home-computer personal market happened without any huge corporation telling others what to build and how to ship their software. The market that is still significantly bigger than the closed garden mobile computers.

Do check on history and actual numbers next time please :/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

PC sales are declining for years and there are easily twice as much mobile users than desktop/laptop users. This trend is not going away anytime soon. Things get even worse if you discount entreprise clients (I assume that VR applications will be mostly user focused).

I don't know. I had my little shareware programs up for download in 1998.

Software thrived on the PC since its original inception. I remember swapping shareware diskettes with my friends back when we had no reasonable access to the internet.

Hell, even DOOM was released as shareware.

A lack of infrastructure is not the same as a bunch of gatekeepers you have to pay for the possibility to distribute your software. Today distributing mobile apps would be highly trivial as every smartphone is connected to the internet. But there are artificial limitations put in place by platform "owners" so they can "curate" the software.

Call me dumb but from a freedom perspective I would prefer the 1998 situation to what we have now with mobile.

>Call me dumb but from a freedom perspective I would prefer the 1998 situation to what we have now with mobile.

The price of the Apple store comes in against the risk of malware downloads as I google for "speedfan.net" and end up with 2 new shopping toolbars and a mitm ad inserter for my browser. (I imagine there's a similar possibility when Sideloading android apks vs getting from the play store)

Sure, freedom is great and all - but there are some gnarly consequences (especially for non expert users) which often result in less security.

>Sure, freedom is great and all - but there are some gnarly consequences (especially for non expert users) which often result in less security.

So because some people don't know better and download suspicious-file.exe all our freedoms should be limited?

It's a problem. Not only tech illiterate people get tricked. People who know better get tricked.

Now, it's worthwhile asking whether one favors one over the other, but to say one choice is pro freedom and the other anti freedom is hyperbole and does not advance the issue either way.

Because some people don't know better and download suspicious-file.exe, the market will tend to grow curated solutions, and those solutions will draw the finite resources in the ecosystem away from alternatives.

That's not really "your freedoms limited" except for opportunity cost---though in the large, the difference between "It could be that way, but nobody really wants to put the effort in besides some hardcore hobbyists" and "It is license / legally banned from being that way" may end up indistinguishable in result.

No. But it is a difficult balance to keep. I am sure we have all had to clean up multiple relatives' computers from spyware and dodgy "Internet toolbars" and viruses. I have lost count how many times I had to do this.

As an alternative, my mum now has an iPad and I have never had to do any of this. And yes, I did attempt to educate my mum on dodgy software etc. as she has been using computers since Windows 98 yet still fell foul.

VR is a fundamentally different animal from little shareware programs. Unless the graphics library is putting hard constraints on the output generated by the device (and I'm not actually sure how one would go about designing that), you can easily make a person very sick with badly-tuned VR.

I think there will be a significant market for curated VR experiences. In fact, my prediction is that market will win---the people who cannot experience bad VR without a physically bad reaction will need someone pre-filtering the content for them. It doesn't necessarily need to be a single-entity-owned market (organized crowdsharing model could in theory do it), but I don't see much future in a "Try some of my cobbled-together hobby VR experiences!" ecosystem for mainstream adoption.

What happens when you close your eyes during VR? Does the expereince stop or does it linger?

> You basically couldn't buy any games online, you'd have to install from DVD, and every game basically had to implement an inbuilt update/patching system.

And it worked fine.

There's one thing worse than the government regulating a market: a company regulating it :)

I agree in general, but there is a danger here as poorly made VR apps can make people physically ill. Not "I feel uncomfortable" ill but "I can't do anything for the next 8 hours" ill.

My guess: badly done VR makes you nauseous. Humans remember under what circumstances they've become nauseous. Google does not want their platform associated in people's minds with nausea, so they're curating.

They did the same with google glass, nausea wasn't the reason.

Curating is the reason.

When a new platform is released (and Daydream is as exciting as a platform can get, till widespread AR atleast) you want the initial experience to be the best possible to increase standards.

In other words, trying to avoid what happened to the smartphone app market where it turned into a wild west mostly devoid of quality control. I guess I can see that.

My 2c guess: porn.

Ha. There is already enough VR porn that out there.

Google is against this greatest sin to save humanity from Fiery Gehenna using DRM.

This confused me until I remembered that Google is recycling the term Daydream. Search for Android Daydream and you'll find a few results for the old lockscreen API (after all the VR hype).

Can we get a VR added in parentheses to disambiguate the title?

This reuse of "Daydream" has been bugging me for month whenever I read about the VR project. Seems like not many people ever took notice of (lockscreen) Daydream or otherwise Google wouldn't just recycle the name.

Me and a partner have been developing a game for the release of Daydream this year on Unreal. We are hobbyists who decided to take a stab at doing something more professional. My concern is that just because we lack a track record of game development we will get rejected from DAP.

Now there is a mad rush to get a website up, and content on the internet for the curators. I must be honest I didn't see this one coming!

Anyway, we are excited to get our content out there and have put in a lot of time and research into understanding what makes a good game. From consistent and strong game thematic, to many many hours of play-ability testing. Will definitely post a link to HN once we have our content up.

Honestly, I do think this is a good thing. The problem I have with VR isn't just the number of apps but the quality and differences in experiences (I am not much of a gamer and the stores are 90% games. Would love to see more 'apps').

DayDream could be a lot of people's first introduction to VR and so having a smaller library of high quality content for a few months before opening the floodgates may not be a bad idea.

Why are they curating by choosing which developers to allow, rather than by choosing which apps to allow, similar to the iOS App Store?

I think because it's so hard to do VR well that they'd have to reject almost all the apps.

They'd have a choice between a terrible first impression for users, or a terrible first impression for developers.

I suppose it isn't as clear cut as that. If you check the application form you do actually submit links to content related to your app. So I imagine it is a combined, developer/app review.

I can understand them wanting to curate at the start, first impressions are critical and shovelware (quickly ported existing Android games and apps) could poison the well.

I'm personally highly interested in developing for Daydream and VR in general, I believe Google's trying to make VR affordable for the masses. Waiting a few months isn't a big deal, if it will help establish a quality bar for what is a good mobile VR app.

Google is trying to test the 'VIP club' effect that worked so well for gmail and facebook in the past.

However, they are not the only kids in the block this time.

Google sure is consistent in guaranteeing that their innovation projects are dead at arrival.

To be fair, this is slightly less lame than Glass, where even the published developers were prohibited from making money by either charging for the app or advertising.

But.. open.. and.. Apple's walled garden.. and..

Google would have better products if it had the focus and control of Apple. Google's products have suffered in the past from a short attention span and early abandonment, not to mention fragmentation. I'm glad Google is taking a page from Apple's playbook and paying more attention to quality control.

> Everyone else will be allowed to publish apps “early next year.”

Assuming this happens, aren't you overstating your point?

What do restrictions for apps on the Play store have to do with walled garden vs open? If the block you from loading VR apps from outside the store, that would be a walled garden. The stores itself IMHO are very similar already.

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