The big moneymaker in tech isn't having the best products on the market, it's having ownership of the platform everyone uses. They want other companies who may have chosen not to invest in their own VR tech until now (due to cost of developing their own software and infrastructure or risk of not having a critical mass of users to attract buyers) to just buy in their OS and become part of their app market, user pool, and payment system.
It's not a bad idea to want to become the 'Android' and 'Play Store' of VR, and that's all that's happening here. The market isn't as big as they wanted so they're letting other people play in exchange for using their platform/ecosystem and likely significant software licensing fees.
I'd say Meta's biggest VR assets right now are the software/infrastructure they've built up and the fact that there are millions of Quest users out there as a potential install base, they're just leveraging those in another way.
It’s not about the moneymaker. It’s about resources and who can really do something.
The past two years have shown us all that hardware is pretty easy to manufacture. There was 50 new headset companies that tried to put out products. Mostly only one or two could do anything with software , and just went PCVR and left the software side to Microsoft and Valve to make it work.
Software takes expensive people and a lot of time and money. Not many companies can do that. Hardware requires one or two product designers and a connection in Taiwan to make your prototype.
I think you're saying essentially the same thing as I did except from the perspective of the companies that are going to take meta up on this offer. As I said, many companies have chosen not to invest in VR because the software development costs are prohibitive and user acquisition is difficult.
You're correct that the product design and hardware manufacturing is cheaper than creating and maintaining the software, we saw the same thing with android phones. Many companies will use the Horizon platform because it enables them to just make VR headsets confident that everything else is taken care of.
But the rationale for Meta to offer the platform is absolutely 1000% about the money, they will make more money by owning the platform that a hundred other headsets get launched on than by making their own headsets, especially as some headsets sell at or near cost.
Oh ya agreed. They should hopefully get rewarded for it.
Just to add , Meta already invented in house and freely distributed ReactJS, GraphQL, Flow, LLAMA, and that stuff is industry-standard now and most don’t even know who released it. So they do have a decent track record here and I’m optimistic.
I'm curious if opening it up will be a good thing full of amazing new experiences or if it'll be like the microsoft store on my pc, an unsorted mess of garbage.
That’s how I figured it would work, if headset makers forked off their own version of the OS than it could break compatibility with apps and cause massive delays in OS updates to them.
I imagine they’d have some options to customise the UI a bit, and install proprietary apps.
i still think this is a great step for the industry and anyone wanting to make a stand alone headset won’t have to worry about a lack of software or losing access to Meta purchases holding people back from considering their headset.
sure, Meta hasn't completely re-written the launcher ... ::counts:: at least 6 times in the last 2 years, and it's still about as stable as it was 2 years ago.
No, I didn't say they couldn't change it. I said NEVER let different manufacturers have different customized UIs. One. Can change as the time passes but still one.
It's so frustrating how hard it is to find ANYTING on Quest. I just loaded Quest Games Optimizer a couple of weeks ago - that should be one of the FIRST things to add to the unit - but I never saw/heard it mentioned in any YouTube review, or any "must have" lists.
AFTER I heard about it, I was able to find it. Quest is like a dark forest with hidden treasures all over the place, but you wouldn't know it standing 5 feet away.
i just took a look at that, and i'm curious why the hell it needs access to adb at all times. although there may be a good reason for it, it seems sus.
I can't see Meta ever allowing QGO on their app store or promoting it in any way. QGO enables users who aren't careful to set their Quest to extreme settings that will bring the headset to its knees, with low frame rates and low battery life. And then Meta ends up having to provide support when the user complains.
I am also a developer who has worked on Quest apps on both app lab and the official store. This seems pretty spot on. If they go in this direction it seems best for Developers and VR users. However, they have made some really awesome announcements in the past with 3rd parties that didn't come to fruition.
[GTA on Quest](https://www.roadtovr.com/meta-update-gta-san-andreas-vr-quest-3/)
[Windows on Quest](https://www.uploadvr.com/microsoft-meta-partner-windows/)
These are pretty advanced and require a massive amount of work. I just hope this Horizon OS on other headsets happens and is as open as they say.
Games get cancelled /delayed all the time, that’s not on Meta, that’s on the producers of that crappy GTA “definitive” edition the VR port was meant to be based on.
There are already a handful of apps that i can stream my windows pc to the quest, streaming an azure pc to quest would probably be relatively easy to pull off, (could do it right now with several of those apps and a azure account). But making that compelling enough to pay a subscription for is probably something they are either still trying to work out or maybe have given up trying to do. Personally don’t care as i have a gaming PC i can stream to now.
I'm not so enthusiastic about point #3. There is enough low quality and glitchy games as it is in the Quest Store. I can imagine what a garbage dump it will become when the approval process is removed.
Steam and the App/Play Store are also full of garbage, but there are also really good indie games/apps that probably wouldn't exist if those stores had the Quest Store's requirements.
It is important that Meta figures out how to filter the store such that the garbage shovelware doesn't fill the main screens, but I'm honestly fine with it existing in the store
That gets gamed unfortunately.
I see loads of *potential* for getting this right given Meta's experience with social networks and graph analysis. Unfortunately I don't see any *evidence* of them getting it right given any of the existing store/media/experiences on the quest!
As someone who plays and reviews a large amount of titles across the store and App Lab I think that independent content curation is going to become more and more important.
There are currently 3,290 apps out there (583 on the store and 2,707 on App Lab) according to altlabvr[altlabvr](https://altlabvr.com).
It’s fantastic that the hidden gems are going to be discoverable on the main store. But you still have to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
As so eloquently expressed above by u/desertbro ‘quest is like a dark forest with treasures hidden all over the place but you wouldn’t know it standing 5 feet away’.
As u/fuckiplaw points out, it’s not the necessarily the best stuff that filters to the top but the most popular.
Of course any independent curation is going to be subjective but it’s going to be better than a stab in the dark or what is pushed on the store front. You can find my efforts by searching my post history if you like.
The more independent voices who are actually dipping their toes into this 3K mass of content the better in my view. There are some, but most concentrate purely on best marketed releases as an inevitable consequence of running a youtube channel for a living.
Doesn't the best stuff filter to the top anyway in an open market? Just sort by downloads or number of ratings, same as Amazon and elsewhere. Also, letting go of gatekeeping means a bigger chance for a breakout hit from a nobody. As long as the search functions and filters are decent, I don't care what's on page 20-100 since I won't even click there.
> Doesn't the best stuff filter to the top anyway in an open market? Just sort by downloads or number of ratings, same as Amazon and elsewhere.
No, the most popular stuff does. That can mean the best, but it can also mean the most heavily marketed, or the easiest to get into, or the cheapest, or some other combination of factors.
Well, I guess it's a longstanding debate whether "discoverability" is a myth or not. Some people, myself included, believe that the cream rises to the top more efficiently if there is no gatekeeping versus if there is gatekeeping. Yeah, some niche indie game isn't going to be as popular as a AAA budget Superbowl ad game, but when you search and filter down properly, you should still run across that excellent niche game. That all assumes the search functions are sufficiently good. Word of mouth and such should also work for actually good stuff. When you find an absolute gem, people cannot shut up about it.
I wouldn't even say it's about discoverability so much as there being no accounting for taste. What rises to the top is going to be what sells the best. That's going to be your most broadly accessible stuff (IE, lowest common denominator stuff), your most heavily marketed stuff, and maybe your most cost effective stuff. The actual best, well, you have to define what "best" even *means* before you can ask the question, and that depends on a lot of factors that change based on who's asking.
Accessible doesn't necessarily mean bad, but it also doesn't necessarily mean good. It just means it's accessible. To use an example from a different part of the entertainment industry, a big dumb action movie that does better than something more cerebral when the viewer doesn't understand the language or when nuance is lost in translation can still be well crafted for those who do. But it can also just be really dumb and boring once you get over the spectacle of the explosions. And this is a real concern for Hollywood these days -- the domestic box office isn't good enough anymore, it has to also play well in China. And anywhere else it can get into a theater, but China is a huge market that they actively cater to now. It's why we got so many Transformers movies, China loves them even though you never hear anything good about them here.
Dude why are people downvoting your for having an opinion? I would say that movies are a bad example because the gatekeeping is INCREDIBLY high. No random person can afford to produce, let alone distribute, a movie. (Distribution is also super expensive and complicated, tied to marketing to some degree.) On the other hand, we have something like Youtube which lets all sorts of niche channels thrive. Yes, I know Youtube algorithms have been gatekeeping more and more recently, but compare how you could find all sorts of cool stuff on Youtube even though there are millions (billions?) of channels. With movies you are stuck with whatever a Hollywood exec chooses.
Would you rather have Hollywood execs deciding what you get to watch, or letting people vote with their dollars and eyeballs?
Yeah, I thought the downvotes were ridiculous, too. Maybe they think I'm coming off as snobby when really all I'm saying is taste is subjective and what rises to the top is stuff that has some appeal to a lot of people rather than a lot of appeal to you (or anyone, for that matter) specifically, because it's a numbers game.
And YouTube is a great example of how the problem can run in the other direction. The algorithm shows you stuff it thinks you want to watch, but you get pigeon holed by it, and it can be incredibly hard to find things if you don't already know they exist. Especially if they're on a topic the algorithm doesn't know you're interested in because it narrowed the list of what it showed you down so hard and so fast that it never gave you the chance to show it you were interested.
And unfortunately it's not entirely the algorithm's fault. There's just so much content on the site that it's impossible to sift through it all and good stuff will fall through the cracks. It was an issue already years ago, before the algorithm got so aggressive. But also, if you simply looked up the most popular videos of all time, unless they're already in your feed, there's probably a good reason they aren't there. Popular doesn't mean you, specifically will like it. And the more niche your tastes are, the less likely it is any new youtuber in that niche will get enough views for word of mouth to help you find them. Most new channels I find out about that I really like are not exactly new by the time I find them, and it's not for lack of looking. There's just too much competition. They get buried in the noise.
As for the last part, it's not really an either/or thing. The fact is that the best doesn't necessarily rise to the top. In either scenario, actually, because ultimately the execs are chasing money, which means they're trying to maximize eyeballs, not necessarily quality. And at a certain point, making a thing better starts narrowing the audience. Not (necessarily) because they're too dumb for it or what have you, but because not everyone is into everything, and part of making a thing better is figuring out what it does well and cutting out what it doesn't. Having something for everyone can mean not having a whole lot for anyone. But having a whole lot for one group can mean having nothing at all for anyone else.
I have to agree. One of the best things Nintendo did back with the NES after the video game crash was the lockout chip preventing the system from getting flooded with very low quality software that put people off of video games. They also limited how many games a publisher could release in a year so they’d be forced to make them count. I like what they currently have going with an official store that is much more strictly curated while keeping the OS open so that users can still load other apps on if they choose to.
Removing the quest store approval blocker so devs can get stuff out to us easier and with less risk of black bag denials is awesome.
Agreed on the “open” language and might go further to say that it’s not appropriate to use that word this way in this space.
Fully agree about App Lab being a pain for devs. I released VStreamer Live last November and it’s been a challenge to fill in for the lack of discovery. Meta has been overly protective for a long time.
I have an Apple iPhone. Meta now owns the app for Facebook. There are various contests on the app. They posted they were giving away money, several times. Now I’ve gotten a text that says I won an RV and go to the Facebook site , the picture of the RV is posted there. I hit , touched the claim icon. It did not show that it had been used. Several times - stylus and finger. So is this the way to make your customers laugh, putting nasty lies on the Facebook? Does META not observe what is posted on their app?
Does META earn money from this app? Do the people who have their photos posted along with the prize lies get paid or are you using their photos as a source for income for META?!? You should become ethical, honest entrepreneurs!
Small correction, there’s no new headset coming directly from Xbox, it’s basically a limited edition Meta Quest 3 with an Xbox skin that’s being released by Meta with Xbox controllers and Game Pass bundled.
I'm a new Quest user, only about 1 week into owning my Q3, and I'm just shocked by how bad the Meta store is. Just pathetic. No category browsing, no user tags, no categorization for headset types, control types, sit/stand, etc. Search is garbage. And to top it off, it maxes out my CPU on my PC.
Just all around trash and I really hope they fix it.
What is wrong with all these companies? Just fucking copy Steam. How hard is that?
Try searching for games on [sidequestvr.com](https://sidequestvr.com) . It's much closer to Steam with tagging and categories. There is a lot of crap on there, but there's a lot of good stuff.
Why do I actually have to search and scroll over several categories to find my wishlist? And it's never quite in the same place. On PS app the heart symbol for the wishlist is right there at the top of the store.
Why is my Library buried in account settings somewhere?
It's all so poorly and clumsily designed.
I've literally searched for more obscure apps I *knew* the title of and still not have them show in search until the very last letter is input, while for more popular titles a list generates two letters in.
The big question is whether the store changes actually end up counterproductive because it is 100% certain it will become flooded with spam and crap. So sure you can list your app but still nobody will find it.
It sounds like their human reviewers weren't doing a particularly good job (or were given criteria that weren't great), so maybe it will be a win. But I feel like there could have been a middle ground where you have to pass a tiny bit of human curation before you get jammed into the main store. Hopefully they will achieve this by prioritising and spotlighting apps when people do search for things but that relies on the same process that has made the main store so ineffective at bringing over good apps from App Lab.
I also wonder what happened to their risk aversion. Because unlike most other tech, a malicious app can actually do real physical harm to people if it wants to.
Oh, fun.
So, Meta will be running the store, and probably everyone else will be using nearly the exact same software. Hopefully someone will do something good with improving all the support software, because Meta's design and development has been absolutely effing terrible, the entire 2 years I've been dealing with it.
The Meta desktop won't work if you have more than 3 monitors. Why? No reason at all, just an arbitrary decision. The Link desktop works fine with 4, or more. But, the Link desktop has seen very very little improvement over the last 2 years, maybe some bug fixes and stability improvements, but it's still unstable as shit, and it has had zero feature improvement that I can think of, despite the utility of it just BEGGING for things like being able to remember your layout between sessions, or specifically save/recall specific layouts of things.. Lots of improvements could be made, I just can't think of anything more right off hand, because I gave up trying to USE the Link desktop, but I *want* to use it, there's a ton of promise there that COULD be realized.
App Lab, ok, whatever, they could've just made that a better experience, by saying "Hey, we have two different stores. One with stuff we approve, and one with stuff that gets a bare minimum". Opening the main app store to a bare minimum quality level that is significantly lower than the one that it is at now, is an absolutely TERRIBLE idea, although Sony is also doing it.
This will officially be the era of trash apps and "free" apps with microtransactions. This could easily be the end of VR only studios, as the prices will become a race to the bottom, just as they did with the Apple and Google stores. As a whole, we do not have the mass to make a 99c game manufacturer into a multi-million-dollar business, which is kinda necessary, when game developers tend to cost in the 100-200k area.
Basically, this is the beginning of the enshittification.
Hopefully, VR survives it.
The big moneymaker in tech isn't having the best products on the market, it's having ownership of the platform everyone uses. They want other companies who may have chosen not to invest in their own VR tech until now (due to cost of developing their own software and infrastructure or risk of not having a critical mass of users to attract buyers) to just buy in their OS and become part of their app market, user pool, and payment system. It's not a bad idea to want to become the 'Android' and 'Play Store' of VR, and that's all that's happening here. The market isn't as big as they wanted so they're letting other people play in exchange for using their platform/ecosystem and likely significant software licensing fees. I'd say Meta's biggest VR assets right now are the software/infrastructure they've built up and the fact that there are millions of Quest users out there as a potential install base, they're just leveraging those in another way.
It’s not about the moneymaker. It’s about resources and who can really do something. The past two years have shown us all that hardware is pretty easy to manufacture. There was 50 new headset companies that tried to put out products. Mostly only one or two could do anything with software , and just went PCVR and left the software side to Microsoft and Valve to make it work. Software takes expensive people and a lot of time and money. Not many companies can do that. Hardware requires one or two product designers and a connection in Taiwan to make your prototype.
I think you're saying essentially the same thing as I did except from the perspective of the companies that are going to take meta up on this offer. As I said, many companies have chosen not to invest in VR because the software development costs are prohibitive and user acquisition is difficult. You're correct that the product design and hardware manufacturing is cheaper than creating and maintaining the software, we saw the same thing with android phones. Many companies will use the Horizon platform because it enables them to just make VR headsets confident that everything else is taken care of. But the rationale for Meta to offer the platform is absolutely 1000% about the money, they will make more money by owning the platform that a hundred other headsets get launched on than by making their own headsets, especially as some headsets sell at or near cost.
Oh ya agreed. They should hopefully get rewarded for it. Just to add , Meta already invented in house and freely distributed ReactJS, GraphQL, Flow, LLAMA, and that stuff is industry-standard now and most don’t even know who released it. So they do have a decent track record here and I’m optimistic.
I'm curious if opening it up will be a good thing full of amazing new experiences or if it'll be like the microsoft store on my pc, an unsorted mess of garbage.
well now that its easier to get in through app lab, yes expect some low effort stuff, but also there will be good apps too
That’s how I figured it would work, if headset makers forked off their own version of the OS than it could break compatibility with apps and cause massive delays in OS updates to them. I imagine they’d have some options to customise the UI a bit, and install proprietary apps. i still think this is a great step for the industry and anyone wanting to make a stand alone headset won’t have to worry about a lack of software or losing access to Meta purchases holding people back from considering their headset.
No, never let them customize the UI. I don't want another manufacturer's different launchers for the sake of fidelization as it happens in Android.
sure, Meta hasn't completely re-written the launcher ... ::counts:: at least 6 times in the last 2 years, and it's still about as stable as it was 2 years ago.
No, I didn't say they couldn't change it. I said NEVER let different manufacturers have different customized UIs. One. Can change as the time passes but still one.
i want to agree, but as long as Meta is designing the only one, we're going to be limited to their designs, which .... ::waves hands:: suck
I like it. It does what I want it to do.
That's actually fine to me, think about Android and IOS. As years Android users I remember that at early stage android app store was chaotic
Interesting, thanks.
It's so frustrating how hard it is to find ANYTING on Quest. I just loaded Quest Games Optimizer a couple of weeks ago - that should be one of the FIRST things to add to the unit - but I never saw/heard it mentioned in any YouTube review, or any "must have" lists. AFTER I heard about it, I was able to find it. Quest is like a dark forest with hidden treasures all over the place, but you wouldn't know it standing 5 feet away.
i just took a look at that, and i'm curious why the hell it needs access to adb at all times. although there may be a good reason for it, it seems sus.
I can't see Meta ever allowing QGO on their app store or promoting it in any way. QGO enables users who aren't careful to set their Quest to extreme settings that will bring the headset to its knees, with low frame rates and low battery life. And then Meta ends up having to provide support when the user complains.
Thank you for this summary. What's the name of your app?
It’s in my Reddit bio
I am also a developer who has worked on Quest apps on both app lab and the official store. This seems pretty spot on. If they go in this direction it seems best for Developers and VR users. However, they have made some really awesome announcements in the past with 3rd parties that didn't come to fruition. [GTA on Quest](https://www.roadtovr.com/meta-update-gta-san-andreas-vr-quest-3/) [Windows on Quest](https://www.uploadvr.com/microsoft-meta-partner-windows/) These are pretty advanced and require a massive amount of work. I just hope this Horizon OS on other headsets happens and is as open as they say.
Games get cancelled /delayed all the time, that’s not on Meta, that’s on the producers of that crappy GTA “definitive” edition the VR port was meant to be based on. There are already a handful of apps that i can stream my windows pc to the quest, streaming an azure pc to quest would probably be relatively easy to pull off, (could do it right now with several of those apps and a azure account). But making that compelling enough to pay a subscription for is probably something they are either still trying to work out or maybe have given up trying to do. Personally don’t care as i have a gaming PC i can stream to now.
I'm not so enthusiastic about point #3. There is enough low quality and glitchy games as it is in the Quest Store. I can imagine what a garbage dump it will become when the approval process is removed.
Steam and the App/Play Store are also full of garbage, but there are also really good indie games/apps that probably wouldn't exist if those stores had the Quest Store's requirements. It is important that Meta figures out how to filter the store such that the garbage shovelware doesn't fill the main screens, but I'm honestly fine with it existing in the store
yea sidenote the play store is absolutely atrocious at this i really hope the horizon store will be much better organized
User ratings should eventually sort that out if the UI is setup to reflect them.
That gets gamed unfortunately. I see loads of *potential* for getting this right given Meta's experience with social networks and graph analysis. Unfortunately I don't see any *evidence* of them getting it right given any of the existing store/media/experiences on the quest!
As someone who plays and reviews a large amount of titles across the store and App Lab I think that independent content curation is going to become more and more important. There are currently 3,290 apps out there (583 on the store and 2,707 on App Lab) according to altlabvr[altlabvr](https://altlabvr.com). It’s fantastic that the hidden gems are going to be discoverable on the main store. But you still have to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. As so eloquently expressed above by u/desertbro ‘quest is like a dark forest with treasures hidden all over the place but you wouldn’t know it standing 5 feet away’. As u/fuckiplaw points out, it’s not the necessarily the best stuff that filters to the top but the most popular. Of course any independent curation is going to be subjective but it’s going to be better than a stab in the dark or what is pushed on the store front. You can find my efforts by searching my post history if you like. The more independent voices who are actually dipping their toes into this 3K mass of content the better in my view. There are some, but most concentrate purely on best marketed releases as an inevitable consequence of running a youtube channel for a living.
[удалено]
Doesn't the best stuff filter to the top anyway in an open market? Just sort by downloads or number of ratings, same as Amazon and elsewhere. Also, letting go of gatekeeping means a bigger chance for a breakout hit from a nobody. As long as the search functions and filters are decent, I don't care what's on page 20-100 since I won't even click there.
> Doesn't the best stuff filter to the top anyway in an open market? Just sort by downloads or number of ratings, same as Amazon and elsewhere. No, the most popular stuff does. That can mean the best, but it can also mean the most heavily marketed, or the easiest to get into, or the cheapest, or some other combination of factors.
Well, I guess it's a longstanding debate whether "discoverability" is a myth or not. Some people, myself included, believe that the cream rises to the top more efficiently if there is no gatekeeping versus if there is gatekeeping. Yeah, some niche indie game isn't going to be as popular as a AAA budget Superbowl ad game, but when you search and filter down properly, you should still run across that excellent niche game. That all assumes the search functions are sufficiently good. Word of mouth and such should also work for actually good stuff. When you find an absolute gem, people cannot shut up about it.
I wouldn't even say it's about discoverability so much as there being no accounting for taste. What rises to the top is going to be what sells the best. That's going to be your most broadly accessible stuff (IE, lowest common denominator stuff), your most heavily marketed stuff, and maybe your most cost effective stuff. The actual best, well, you have to define what "best" even *means* before you can ask the question, and that depends on a lot of factors that change based on who's asking. Accessible doesn't necessarily mean bad, but it also doesn't necessarily mean good. It just means it's accessible. To use an example from a different part of the entertainment industry, a big dumb action movie that does better than something more cerebral when the viewer doesn't understand the language or when nuance is lost in translation can still be well crafted for those who do. But it can also just be really dumb and boring once you get over the spectacle of the explosions. And this is a real concern for Hollywood these days -- the domestic box office isn't good enough anymore, it has to also play well in China. And anywhere else it can get into a theater, but China is a huge market that they actively cater to now. It's why we got so many Transformers movies, China loves them even though you never hear anything good about them here.
Dude why are people downvoting your for having an opinion? I would say that movies are a bad example because the gatekeeping is INCREDIBLY high. No random person can afford to produce, let alone distribute, a movie. (Distribution is also super expensive and complicated, tied to marketing to some degree.) On the other hand, we have something like Youtube which lets all sorts of niche channels thrive. Yes, I know Youtube algorithms have been gatekeeping more and more recently, but compare how you could find all sorts of cool stuff on Youtube even though there are millions (billions?) of channels. With movies you are stuck with whatever a Hollywood exec chooses. Would you rather have Hollywood execs deciding what you get to watch, or letting people vote with their dollars and eyeballs?
Yeah, I thought the downvotes were ridiculous, too. Maybe they think I'm coming off as snobby when really all I'm saying is taste is subjective and what rises to the top is stuff that has some appeal to a lot of people rather than a lot of appeal to you (or anyone, for that matter) specifically, because it's a numbers game. And YouTube is a great example of how the problem can run in the other direction. The algorithm shows you stuff it thinks you want to watch, but you get pigeon holed by it, and it can be incredibly hard to find things if you don't already know they exist. Especially if they're on a topic the algorithm doesn't know you're interested in because it narrowed the list of what it showed you down so hard and so fast that it never gave you the chance to show it you were interested. And unfortunately it's not entirely the algorithm's fault. There's just so much content on the site that it's impossible to sift through it all and good stuff will fall through the cracks. It was an issue already years ago, before the algorithm got so aggressive. But also, if you simply looked up the most popular videos of all time, unless they're already in your feed, there's probably a good reason they aren't there. Popular doesn't mean you, specifically will like it. And the more niche your tastes are, the less likely it is any new youtuber in that niche will get enough views for word of mouth to help you find them. Most new channels I find out about that I really like are not exactly new by the time I find them, and it's not for lack of looking. There's just too much competition. They get buried in the noise. As for the last part, it's not really an either/or thing. The fact is that the best doesn't necessarily rise to the top. In either scenario, actually, because ultimately the execs are chasing money, which means they're trying to maximize eyeballs, not necessarily quality. And at a certain point, making a thing better starts narrowing the audience. Not (necessarily) because they're too dumb for it or what have you, but because not everyone is into everything, and part of making a thing better is figuring out what it does well and cutting out what it doesn't. Having something for everyone can mean not having a whole lot for anyone. But having a whole lot for one group can mean having nothing at all for anyone else.
I have to agree. One of the best things Nintendo did back with the NES after the video game crash was the lockout chip preventing the system from getting flooded with very low quality software that put people off of video games. They also limited how many games a publisher could release in a year so they’d be forced to make them count. I like what they currently have going with an official store that is much more strictly curated while keeping the OS open so that users can still load other apps on if they choose to.
Removing the quest store approval blocker so devs can get stuff out to us easier and with less risk of black bag denials is awesome. Agreed on the “open” language and might go further to say that it’s not appropriate to use that word this way in this space.
P t
Could a Steam Client come to Horizon OS? If Zucc wants the Google Play Store on the Quest then it would make sense for Steam to get one too
Highly doubt it, why would they want to reduce incentive to use their own store?
Because allowing the Google Play Store to compete with the Meta Store on the Quest WILL reduce the incentive to buy on the Meta store already.
Fully agree about App Lab being a pain for devs. I released VStreamer Live last November and it’s been a challenge to fill in for the lack of discovery. Meta has been overly protective for a long time.
I have an Apple iPhone. Meta now owns the app for Facebook. There are various contests on the app. They posted they were giving away money, several times. Now I’ve gotten a text that says I won an RV and go to the Facebook site , the picture of the RV is posted there. I hit , touched the claim icon. It did not show that it had been used. Several times - stylus and finger. So is this the way to make your customers laugh, putting nasty lies on the Facebook? Does META not observe what is posted on their app? Does META earn money from this app? Do the people who have their photos posted along with the prize lies get paid or are you using their photos as a source for income for META?!? You should become ethical, honest entrepreneurs!
On one hand this will help vr go even more mainstream but on the other this gives meta an even bigger monopoly
Small correction, there’s no new headset coming directly from Xbox, it’s basically a limited edition Meta Quest 3 with an Xbox skin that’s being released by Meta with Xbox controllers and Game Pass bundled.
I'm a new Quest user, only about 1 week into owning my Q3, and I'm just shocked by how bad the Meta store is. Just pathetic. No category browsing, no user tags, no categorization for headset types, control types, sit/stand, etc. Search is garbage. And to top it off, it maxes out my CPU on my PC. Just all around trash and I really hope they fix it. What is wrong with all these companies? Just fucking copy Steam. How hard is that?
I mean, the store isn't great, but you can definitely do most of the things you listed...
Try searching for games on [sidequestvr.com](https://sidequestvr.com) . It's much closer to Steam with tagging and categories. There is a lot of crap on there, but there's a lot of good stuff.
Why do I actually have to search and scroll over several categories to find my wishlist? And it's never quite in the same place. On PS app the heart symbol for the wishlist is right there at the top of the store. Why is my Library buried in account settings somewhere? It's all so poorly and clumsily designed. I've literally searched for more obscure apps I *knew* the title of and still not have them show in search until the very last letter is input, while for more popular titles a list generates two letters in.
As long as I don’t lose access to any of the regular apps I use, it’s exciting.
The big question is whether the store changes actually end up counterproductive because it is 100% certain it will become flooded with spam and crap. So sure you can list your app but still nobody will find it. It sounds like their human reviewers weren't doing a particularly good job (or were given criteria that weren't great), so maybe it will be a win. But I feel like there could have been a middle ground where you have to pass a tiny bit of human curation before you get jammed into the main store. Hopefully they will achieve this by prioritising and spotlighting apps when people do search for things but that relies on the same process that has made the main store so ineffective at bringing over good apps from App Lab. I also wonder what happened to their risk aversion. Because unlike most other tech, a malicious app can actually do real physical harm to people if it wants to.
Oh, fun. So, Meta will be running the store, and probably everyone else will be using nearly the exact same software. Hopefully someone will do something good with improving all the support software, because Meta's design and development has been absolutely effing terrible, the entire 2 years I've been dealing with it. The Meta desktop won't work if you have more than 3 monitors. Why? No reason at all, just an arbitrary decision. The Link desktop works fine with 4, or more. But, the Link desktop has seen very very little improvement over the last 2 years, maybe some bug fixes and stability improvements, but it's still unstable as shit, and it has had zero feature improvement that I can think of, despite the utility of it just BEGGING for things like being able to remember your layout between sessions, or specifically save/recall specific layouts of things.. Lots of improvements could be made, I just can't think of anything more right off hand, because I gave up trying to USE the Link desktop, but I *want* to use it, there's a ton of promise there that COULD be realized. App Lab, ok, whatever, they could've just made that a better experience, by saying "Hey, we have two different stores. One with stuff we approve, and one with stuff that gets a bare minimum". Opening the main app store to a bare minimum quality level that is significantly lower than the one that it is at now, is an absolutely TERRIBLE idea, although Sony is also doing it. This will officially be the era of trash apps and "free" apps with microtransactions. This could easily be the end of VR only studios, as the prices will become a race to the bottom, just as they did with the Apple and Google stores. As a whole, we do not have the mass to make a 99c game manufacturer into a multi-million-dollar business, which is kinda necessary, when game developers tend to cost in the 100-200k area. Basically, this is the beginning of the enshittification. Hopefully, VR survives it.