This isn't supposed to be a rant thread, but I am genuinely surprised about how bad the experience has been for us so far developing for the oculus platform in terms of available resources and support.
On the end-user side, oculus/Meta seems to do a really good job in providing resources and quick support, but it seems to be quite the contrary on the developer side and it just puzzles me why this is the case.
There are hardly any answers from oculus engineers on this forum, support tickets take forever and don't yield any actual help and SDK documentation is often seriously lacking.
Given that Meta is so dedicated in pushing the Metaverse, I'm genuinely surprised about the way they treat developers that dedicate their time and resources building experiences for their platform, and thus I wonder whether they maybe internally have the stance that developing polished VR experiences is something rather difficult that they don't expect independent developers to come up with and thus focus their resources on providing direct support channels to the big studios instead?
I'd be interested to hear about the experience of other devs on here and also what place you go to when you have problems or questions (because the official developer forum doesn't seem to yield any results for any non-trivial questions/problems)?
I thought oculus was meant to be the one with the better support system.
I have not had too many issues as of yet, but I am new to a lot of this and I am keeping it simple. Though I am noticing a lot of questionable decisions been causing no end of headaches.
I need to get quests for commercial use and now they don't sell them. You must have a Facebook account and you cannot set up a device in kiosk mode. Telling me a solution might be available next year really helps when my project has a month deadline. That is not to mention what I hear about the commercial product itself. It sounds bad. Who wants to send so much on one device and a subscription on top of that for a device that is objectively inferior to the consumer version.
Having support tell me to talk to the guys who cannot help me did not help either.
Heres my short and sweet answer, maybe if customers knew how to use the device better, or if customers acted better.
Its not that support is terrible, is that with 2/3's of steam vr users being quest owners and millions more adding monthly. The people who perceive that support is so bad are the ones breaking the system.
Or the device doesn't do something you think should, or families scamming the devs. Or the many who are trying to scam referrals.
Or the beggar-chooser complaints about beat saber dlc.
I also find that the documentation is sometimes lacking. However, I wrote a ticket using the "contact us" button on the bottom of the page, specified that the subject as "documentation" and wrote what I thought was lacking for one subject. I honestly got a fairly quick answer (during the same day).
I think that for this type of issue, it is more effective to do it that way, rather than post something on the forums. That's what my experience is like anyways.
I gave up before I got started on an App because, as an Indie Developer, I couldn't sort through all the Terms and Agreements for all the SDKs! It seemed as though, as a developer, you really can't do anything legally and stay within the specified terms. Don't have a lawyer to decipher all their terms so why bother developing an App for Quest!
I've submitted my app on December 22 last year, knowing it would take some time because of a "flood" of VR games (just thousands every day *sigh* ) during Christmas I've waited for a month before opening a ticket to ask for the team to review the game so it can be published or fixed and resubmitted. They asked me to send them images of my submission page and everything is in order, the support said that if they dont review it by the end of the week to make another ticket. They didnt and I did, the next person that responded said "we cannot give you an ETA as the team is very buisy", i let another month go by - replied to the same ticket, let her know we still didnt get a review, she said that there is nothing they can do and I just have to wait until it's my turn. Its now been almost 4 months, a third of a year, and my game still hasn't been checked, and I doubt that the review team has been notified at all, utter.garbage.
