Just wondered how a game goes from App Labs to the main Oculus store?
Is it down to how popular your app is?
I'm not sure if this is good or bad for indie developers since indie developers don't have lots of money for promotion and advertising. But it is good in other ways in that it lets more games in past the "gate keepers".
The Steam model works quite well where you pay $100 deposit or so to get your game on the store.
Is SideQuest going to be the main website where you can find App Lab games?
Oculus will decide if your app is a good fit for the quest store. It is 100% up to them unfortunately. Having a popular side quest app definitely helps but even popular side quest apps (Pavlov, Virtual Desktop, & others) do not get accepted for oculus' own internal reasons. The app lab and side quest is the only other options at the moment.
Currently side quest is the only library of current App Lab games.
App Lab is not same as Sidequest, user not require developer account and setup a pc to install, just find the app from web browser then purchase it directly from Oculus or add it to Wishlist and then it appear in the user Wishlist in Quest store.
There are many website listed all app lab apps, the developer have to worry is the rating of his app, not app lab popularity. All the VR website and youtuber will introduce app lab to user, later everyone will know app lab is like pre-release app and a lot of good apps in there, just find them from website that listed them.
For indie developers with 1-5 people, earning 1 million is good enough and it will continue selling more and more as more VR users is coming every months, if the app is popular it earn 1 million every year. Compare to small studio with 15-25 people their yearly cost(total salary) is 1-2 millions, their app price have to be $15-25 to cover the cost.
Why the app does not sold much is because of the price. If the price $2 or $5 user will give it a try and give rating of worth buying it, this bring the app popular, but if the price $10 and above, user would want to save the money to buy other apps that they are more interested like Beat Saber or Saints & Sinners. Pavlov is free in app lab, are the developer missing a lot of opportunity to made money, no, it is marketing, more users in the game more popular the game become and there are much more users coming to VR, more than existing users, they earn big from there.
