Read This Before You Make a Game for the Oculus Quest
What happened?
It’s never nice to be rejected, but when you’ve been working on a game for months, you’re finally happy with it, and then you get rejected with no explanation, that’s not a nice feeling.
I was hoping to start by announcing that Grand Reality (my first ever game) would soon be launching on Oculus Quest.
However, after applying to the Oculus Quest Store, and submitting the required 3-page ‘concept document’, I was rejected with a canned response.
To be clear, the game wasn’t rejected based on the content or performance, it was rejected purely based on the 3-page concept document.
So why was my application rejected? Well, Oculus won’t tell me, but I have a couple of theories…
It turns out that I’m not alone
It turns out that I’m not the only indie developer that’s been rejected from the Quest store. In fact, it didn’t take me long to find out that there are a lot of similar stories out there. The developers I’ve spoken to have all received short, canned responses with no reasons given and any attempts to find out more information are met with vague answers and deflection.
Great games like;
The list goes on. Most are lone developers or small indie studios lacking major publisher backing.
The one exception I can find is Pavlov VR — a successful indie shooter which was initially rejected by Oculus but has now been granted permission to sell on the official Quest Store.
So here’s my theory;
Oculus/Facebook don’t want indie developers on the Quest
This is what Oculus have put on their publishing FAQs:
We have always had a curated approach on our storefronts to ensure that developers are meeting our content policy guidelines and that customers were getting safe and comfortable VR experiences. As a brand-new platform that will be introducing VR to many people for the first time, we want to make sure that new Oculus Quest players find the best types of experiences they expect from a VR title: satisfying depth of play, fidelity, and a presence in VR that utilizes 6DOF + movement.
OK, Oculus, I get it, you want to curate your store and make sure that your grandparents, upon trying out their new Quest on Christmas morning, don’t stumble across VR Fisting XTREME. But taking this elitist stance and cutting out indie developers means that you’re also sacrificing a huge amount of potential innovation, which in these early stages of VR is crucial to finding success in a larger market.
As a Quest owner, I want the next Beat Saber — probably the biggest indie VR success story — to be developed for the Quest. As it stands, that’s unlikely to be the case.
Other people have suggested that there’s also a commercial aspect to their policy. But as far as I can make out the cost to Oculus for hosting indie games can’t be very much at all, and even if only 1% of the indie games they allow on the store are moderately successful, they should make a profit. It certainly seems to be working for Steam.
Time to Rethink?
So why can’t Oculus allow indie developers onto the store without sacrificing the Quest’s virgin VR-gamer purity. Here’s a couple of ideas:
- Create a silo’d ‘indie’ section of the store which isn’t accessible (or at least obvious) when you first turn on your Quest and only targets gamers who are comfortable pushing the limits of their device.
- Allow ‘unlisted’ games which aren’t promoted on the store at all, but still allow indie developers to distribute their games.
There are alternatives, such as the Sidequest store and, of course, the Steam platform. But Oculus, if you’re listening, please re-think your approach to indie developer on the Quest. And, at a bare minimum, please make your application process more transparent so that you’re not alienating the very people who want to promote and develop your platform.
