Hacker News Reader

Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

> That’s why we’re going all-in, and we won’t be shipping any more 3DOF VR products.

This is not exactly surprising, but still a bold and absolutely correct move from Oculus.

As a developer who was rejected from the Oculus Quest store before, it's great to hear that they now how concrete plans to start opening up the store.

View on HN

I'll believe their new distribution method when I see it. How will they handicap it? How will they maintain their requisite absolute control? And we won't see it until sometime next year? Hmm. (Spoken as someone who was rejected from the Rift store.)

Yeah anything from them should be taken with a healthy grain of salt at this point, but I'm cautiously optimistic. My game was on Go/Rift but reject from Quest with a "Why don't you try releasing on the Rift first!" message. This despite my game already being on Rift with 10,000+ downloads and a 4.5 star rating average. I said it when they announced the approval process for Quest, and I'll say it again, it was too early in VR's life to pull an Apple.

Its actually kind of funny for them how much money they seem to be making hand-over-fist with their Oculus Store and Quest titles.

But not funny when you are locked out of that. And they can lock out apps or games that they have a conflict with in terms of titles they are associated with themselves or any other reason.

I think if their new distribution system isn't open enough, that leads the market wide open for someone to come in with a device that has an open marketplace and I would drop Oculus in a second if that were the case. Because Sideloading is a pain in the ass.

I feel like so much of the submission to the Quest store lead to a lot of devs adding stupid features / mechanics _just_ to show off the quest features (forced climbing or hand interactions and similar in games where it doesn't really seem necessary).

Trying to inject themselves into development at the concept phase (at least for Quest) sucked too. I understand not wanting trash in the store but there has to be a middle ground.

>How will they handicap it? How will they maintain their requisite absolute control?

I mean they already allow you to install anything you want on the device with a single click so not sure why you're using this sort of language.

Think they clearly just want a middle ground where indie developers can release something but there isn't a chance of malware.

I'm imagining you'll just have a direct link to your app in the store that you can use e.g. on your website or submit to SideQuest. Your app won't be findable on the Quest store otherwise. Why is that hard to believe?

> Why is that hard to believe?

Because they haven't given us any of these details that you're imagining. Will there still be an approval process? Will Facebook give up any control? Will this be just like "keys only" distribution, a return of the Concepts/Early Access channel, or something like the old Oculus Share? So...I'll believe it when I see it.

Recently, I ran across this purportedly leaked strategy letter on VR/AR at FB.

https://www.scribd.com/document/399594551/2015-06-22-MARK-S-...

From that, it seems odd they'd be willing to give up control. So like you, I'll believe it when I see it.

In the linked blog post, they say that apps will be still subject to their policies (same as when you want your app in the iOS app store or Android Play Store), but that you'll have a direct link to distribute.

The direct link mention is encouraging, I hope they do something interesting with the opportunity

> > That’s why we’re going all-in, and we won’t be shipping any more 3DOF VR products.

> This is not exactly surprising, but still a bold and absolutely correct move from Oculus.

> As a developer who was rejected from the Oculus Quest store before, it's great to hear that they now how concrete plans to start opening up the store.

If you were rejected from the Quest store, you can still put your content out there on SideQuest.

And I have. But the reality is that the vast majority of Quest users don't know about SideQuest and/or don't want the hassle of sideloading.

And SideQuest is terrible experience for me.

Sideloaded apps now give multiple scary warnings about the Terms of Service: See e.g. https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/4487.pn... .

"May put your account and device at risk" is not going to get you a viable third-party app ecosystem, especially when it's an open question what Facebook/Oculus might decide to clamp down on in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com