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ejonathanlindgr
Participant
January 15, 2021

Is Oculus the right platform for hobby developers?

I have been working on an Oculus GO app for some time, and the Oculus GO was a good platform for me, since my game ideas do not require very high end graphics or advanced controls. I was thus quite disappointed when I read that the Oculus Go was being dropped. I was then looking into buying a more modern VR headset, such as Oculus Quest, but what I read so far has made me quite skeptical, since the requirements for submitting an app seem quite strict (and development tools are not even available before being approved).

I find this attitude a bit hostile to people like me who does game development as a hobby. I am not a professional. I don't plan to earn money on my app, I just want to share interesting VR ideas I have that I think people would enjoy, but it would quite likely be impossible for me to make an app of the same quality as a professional game development team. I am worried that I will spend a significant amount of time into developing an app, only to get rejected at app submission due to some aspects not being of good enough quality, and without the proper resources and time (as a one man team hobby developer, who does not work with anything remotely similar to game development at my job), not being able to solve the issues to the satisfaction of the Oculus team. I find this attitude not very open towards amateur developers who want to share their ideas of interesting VR concepts. 

My VR development is thus currently stalled, and I am in the works of making my game into a desktop game instead and publish it on my own website. Until I feel confident that Oculus is supportive of non-professional developers (or I find a different platform), I will wait with continuing my VR development journey.

Is my impression of the current status of Oculus correct, or have I misunderstood something?

    1 reply

    kojack
    kojack
    Honored Contributor
    January 19, 2021

    ejonathanlindgren said:

    I was then looking into buying a more modern VR headset, such as Oculus Quest, but what I read so far has made me quite skeptical, since the requirements for submitting an app seem quite strict (and development tools are not even available before being approved).

    The Quest is the strictest Oculus platform for submitting to the store, but its possible to release games for it outside of the store using SideQuest.
    Development on the Quest has the same requirement as the Go, you need to turn on developer mode and to do that requires a developer account. They added the extra requirement recently of payment or phone details to get a developer account approved due to all the people registering as developers who really just wanted to play custom Beat Saber songs.

    But for dev tools, its the same as the Go. For example in Unity, I got some of my student's Go projects running on my Quest by just plugging the Quest in instead of the Go and hitting build. The only dev tool you need in Unity is the standard Oculus asset, which works for Go, Rift and Quest (well, not Go anymore, sadly) and has no requirements needing approval. (No idea about Unreal, I don't use it).

    It's not out yet, but Oculus are going to have an easier distribution system for Quests besides the store and sideloading, so you don't need to meet all of the requirements (still need to meet content policies, but not the other stuff). The roadmap says its due in Q1 2021.

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