That's where we come in: Android Central has a staff full of VR fanatics who spend their leisure time blocking out reality with the Oculus Quest 2 - which does run on an Android OS, believe it or not. The fact is, most VR games are short, when what you want is short and sweet. The Oculus Store isn't like Steam, where you can build up huge libraries for cheap and 64GB headset owners have to be careful not to fill up their hard drives with junk. But the platforms, Oculus included, must also demonstrate that the market can do more than sustain 10 or 20 VR hits, that it can also help a healthy long tail of smaller studios to be sustainable and grow, because an ecosystem without a tail is really not an ecosystem at all.Among the several hundred games and apps on the Oculus Quest storefront, most of them cost between $10 and $40 while only offering about 3 to 5 hours of gameplay on average. In VR, Oculus often celebrates the hits, as it shows that the ecosystem is growing, that you can build up an entire studio based on VR titles. All creative productions, including games or apps, are always in a very diverse market, with a few big hits and long tails of smaller and smaller successes (Success for a solo dev is not the same as success for a 50-person studio!). Instead of struggling with solo marketing that, frankly, doesn’t work that well at that small scale, we could all benefit from doing things more collectively. They try many things, like paid advertising here and there, but they have a really hard time just being seen by the players who would love their games. VR devs are very isolated right now, there are no events, and as the ecosystem is still a majority of indie and solo developers, they are also quite isolated in terms of marketing and communication. So Lab Surprise, like the Waiting for App Lab bundle before, is a project to help build up and sustain the indie VR dev ecosystem, to help create a support system for indie VR devs when they want to reach out to players. I think the vast majority of games I played lately comes from solo developers. “The VR ecosystem, including Quest, is still mostly solo developers. Is Lab Surprise a direct response to these collective frustrations? However, thanks to Oculus Store keys devs can experiment: create sales, do giveaways or contests, try and sell on third party platforms… Oculus gave all the developers the official go to sell keys the way they want.” And of course we get no exposure at all from Oculus, all App Lab apps are considered off-platform. So, on App Lab, we don’t have the full capability of a platform like Steam or Itch. Players ask if we are going to offer DLCs or more content using IAPs in App Lab apps, or offer cross-buy with Rift, and again, it’s not something that is under the control of developers to unlock, including all the new features that come to the official store like Subscriptions.
“App Lab is a great step forward for indie devs on Quest, with super easy updates for our players, very important anonymized user engagement data… But marketing-wise, it lacks features like setting up a co-op bundle with other App Lab apps, setting a temporary discount on an app… players also cannot buy-as-gift an App Lab app (and some of us already had players complaining about that… there’s sadly nothing we can do here). What are some of the issues developers have with the current state of App Lab?
So we worked hard in the last few days to onboard 5 new developers who reached to us (including making them verified Paddle vendors in no time), going from 364 bundle combinations to 969 unique bundle combinations… which is kind of crazy if you think of it! 969 different bundles of 3 games, isn’t that more than everyone ever did in 2 years on Quest? And we also give an upgrade to the site.” (that’s debatable of course, as gathering 14 App Lab games is already not bad at all!). But we also faced two big criticisms: the micro-site was barebone, and the lineup of games was maybe too small with 14 games. So I think, even if you don’t like surprises you can get something out of Lab Surprise. Some players told us they don’t like the idea of the surprise box, and for them we offer the possibility of fully revealing as many surprises as they want and get a 10% discount when they find a nice bundle they like. Julien Dorra / Image Credit: Julien Dorra