Not sure if this belongs here or on the VR forum.

Since this is a rant about business practices I decided to post it in the lounge:

Just finished approving my first Oculus Rift game, and I am very frustrated.

I am a hobby developer, distributing free games of hobby quality.

I have distributed games on other platforms before: Android, Facebook, IPhone, etc...

My goal by publishing to an "app store" is to get people to play my game.

Mostly it's intended for people like you (enthusiasts on various forums) to try it out and give me feedback.

As such what I usually expect to get at the end of the process is a store page where people can download my app to their device.

Since my apps are not AAA attempts, I never expect to get much exposure. I accept the fact that I will be #150 on any store search result. It is not fair to expect any of the app stores to promote my mediocre hobby effort.

That said, I still expect the option to self promote. I still want to be able to post my store link on a dedicated Facebook page, or on the "your announcements" forums, and give enthusiasts access to my work.

And this is where Oculus upset me:

I submitted my game to Oculus, and they approved it as "keys only.".

"keys only" means that I have to give out *one-off*  keys to people so that they can download my app.

It means that I cannot post URLs of said game and let people download it ( I need to provide each person with a unique key ).

To add insult to injury, Oculus required me to drop Steam OpenVR support before reviewing my app, and also add their "entitlement" DRM to make sure it doesn't run without their permission.

I spent a day after I had the game ported to oculus adding and testing all of this boring DRM stuff. I could have just uploaded a DRM-free Steam + Oculus executable without going through the trouble of uploading to the store.

What more, there were no suggestions on what needs to be improved in order to lose the "keys only" status.

I am really frustrated at this.

To be honest, I didn't expect to be featured anywhere. I just wanted an easy way to distribute my hobby project to others by giving them a link, and reading their comments. I really find that rewarding with regards to my other hobby projects.

Seems to me that Oculus are being unfriendly to the hobby developer.

What happened to them? I remember that they always had a place for "uncurated experiences" in one form or another.

PS: If anyone has an idea on how I can self-promote my game besides tweeting random keys at people, I would love to hear it.

This reads very much like a Business issue, so I'm moving it to the Business forum.

It's always been like this. I don't really have a problem with it.

Look at it from their perspective as a business: They are there to make money off of their store. If people upload stuff to their store for free, they get nothing out of it. They also want to curate the content available on their store so that the content is quality and reflects their content quality standards. They don't want their store to turn into another XBox Live Arcade, where people create and upload fart apps and general garbage. So, with that in mind, they're actually pretty nice and supportive about letting you upload your game even if they don't make money off of it. This is great for early feedback and testing (kinda what you're doing) during ongoing development. When you continue developing and polishing your game and making it higher quality, you may decide to resubmit it and start charging a price for it. In those cases, the very light entitlement check suddenly makes sense.

Also, Oculus doesn't like having the SteamVR dlls included in a project. If you have SteamVR running and you have your oculus plugged in, many times your Oculus won't get any display input until you shut down SteamVR. They don't play nicely with each other, so the oculus policy is to protect users from having confusing hardware problems and submitting unnecessary trouble tickets. Sure, it would be nice if Oculus worked with SteamVR, but Oculus has no business incentive to support their competitors platform. It's just going to be something you have to deal with if you want to support Oculus Store.

If you don't like the oculus store key only distribution approach, you have a few other options:
1) Pay $100 and distribute your game on steam. You can send links to your steam game from there.
2) Host your own website which contains a publicly available link to your game. This will also cost you money. 

2 hours ago, SillyCow said:

What happened to them? I remember that they always had a place for "uncurated experiences" in one form or another.

I guess they've gone curated.

3 hours ago, SillyCow said:

I just wanted an easy way to distribute my hobby project to others by giving them a link

You can just put it in a ZIP and host it on your own website, right? That will cost you money, but you can't really expect that Oculus would just pay your hosting bills for you...

3 hours ago, SillyCow said:

To add insult to injury, Oculus required me to drop Steam OpenVR support before reviewing my app, and also add their "entitlement" DRM to make sure it doesn't run without their permission.

That kind of stuff is painful but totally normal when publishing games via the big gatekeepers. You've always had do a separate build for each big platform/store. You don't put android-specific stuff in your iOS build, or anything that references Sony in your Microsoft build. The Oculus store is a locked down platform, exclusively for Oculus hardware. On game consoles there's pages and pages of detailed checklists of things to comply with, from the amount of animation on loading screens, to iconography indicating hard-drive usage, to CRT safe zones and maximum frame lengths...
Shipping drivers for a completely different platform as part of your build is an obvious compliance failure.

3 hours ago, SillyCow said:

It means that I cannot post URLs of said game and let people download it 

You could have a button on a website that picks the next key out of a list and shows it to the website visitor.

Humble bundle have a widget like this where you can upload a file full of keys, and they sell them to your visitors for you. Not sure if they support $0/free games or not, but they might

17 hours ago, slayemin said:

It's always been like this. I don't really have a problem with it.
2) Host your own website which contains a publicly available link to your game. This will also cost you money. 

The problem for me is that Oculus is a closed platform. I don't expect people I don't know to download my EXE files. And then tick the *allow apps from third parties*. I wouldn't go through that trouble for other people... For example: In android I don't know if this 3rd party APK hasn't been modified by a fourth party, so I really stick to downloading from the official store. 

The funny thing is: Oculus went through the trouble of approving my app. They sort-of signed off on the fact that it isn't malware. And they allow people to download it straight from their store (as long as I give them a key). So they are both hosting my downloads, and vouching for it's integrity (By not calling it "third party"). If I provide my own link I get none of that.

PS: For the volume of downloads I expect to get hosting is free. My best non-vr games had 50,000 downloads (less than 100 DLs a day) . My best VR game had hundreds: Not many people have VR, and of those only a small subset will try a hobby game. A publicly shared drop-box link would do the trick. (but I will still have "normal" oculus users blocking me because I am a third party)

16 hours ago, Hodgman said:

On game consoles there's pages and pages of detailed checklists of things to comply with, from the amount of animation on loading screens, to iconography indicating hard-drive usage, to CRT safe zones and maximum frame lengths...

This is what really had me disappointed: As a hobbyist I know to stay away from Sony and Nintendo. They make it perfectly clear that I am not welcome on their platform by setting a really sharp gateway: Their SDKs (and dev hardware) are licensed at thousands of $$$, and they will only sell them to you if they believe in your studio. (I understand that Sony is loosening up on this policy). I am perfectly fine with that. Nothing on those platforms ever made me think that they wanted me there.

However, since buying the DK1, I saw Oculus relying heavily on small indie demos and publishing them on their site (there was no store back then). Then I bought the CV1 and saw a lot of low-quality content still on the new store. I looked into their store, and Dev section, and saw that the SDK was completely free and public. (If I am not mistaken Nintendo and Sony make you sign an NDA just to make sure the SDK doesn't make it's way into the open ). The list of quality requirements seemed very similar to what you would find on Google Daydream, so I got the feeling I was welcome there. (I've published twice on Daydream before). That's why I was so disappointed. Somehow I got the wrong idea.

18 hours ago, slayemin said:

1) Pay $100 and distribute your game on steam. You can send links to your steam game from there.

I am perfectly fine with that. I've already paid these sort of fees to google and apple. I didn't choose oculus because it was free. I chose it because I have a Rift. Had I known that Oculus was so closed, I wouldn't have wasted a week of my time submitting to their store. I've put in months of hobby time into this so far. I would gladly pay 100$ to get 20 unbiased comments for my game.

I guess what I am complaining about is that Oculus gave me the impression that it was more akin to Apple or Android than to Nintendo and Sony. That's why I chose their platform. Had I known that they weren't I would have stayed away.