I would actually love to put it up for sale through itch.io, but what happens when someone actually buys the game? They have to lie to Oculus and say they're a developer, and we all have to hope that Facebook doesn't Alter The Deal. I wouldn't trust that arrangement after taking someone's money, and I won't give the game out for free either.
Really the answer here is competition. If Quest had a competitor, I could take my game there and tell customers to buy that product instead. But it would be even better if the competition was open source.
Maybe the best you can do is price it low to account for the risk, and put big warnings that it'll only work as long as Facebook continues to allow side-loading. If people still want to buy it, that's on them.
Looked at your profile and I assume we're talking about Soundboxing?
Did Oculus give any feedback on why they won't put it in the store? Looking at your website, I'm thinking it makes heavy use of user-created tracks with the audio being pulled from YouTube (based on the VEVO thumbnails)? Is YouTube ok with that kind of embedding?
The Quest store just put Synth Riders up this week, so clearly it's not a complete ban on games that play unlicensed user-sequenced tracks. But those have to be loaded into a folder on the device from your computer instead of "HAND MADE CHALLENGES" with a Daft Punk song prominently featured in the marketing material.
No, in the many discussions I've had with Oculus, they've not given me a solid reason. If you talk to other developers, it is apparently their policy not to give feedback.
My game embeds a full browser, and can navigate to YouTube pages - it really is a full browser though, showing ads and dutifully registering tracking impressions and everything. But the browser is actually just background noise, the actual challenge is a motion captured artistic performance, and that drives everything in the game - this is well-protected by fair use.
The browser state is just made to sync up with that performance, and the side-effect is that, if the creator of the mocap moved reasonably in line with the music, you feel as if you're moving to the music too, when in fact you're actually interacting with the motion capture.
You might consider feeling out r/oculusquest to see if people would be interested. Or maybe a limited free itch.io version that's restricted to a defined YouTube playlist?
There's a pretty big crowd of people in that community set up for sideloading. Main reasons being Beat Saber mods, Pavlov beta, Tea for God, Virtual Desktop with SteamVR streaming, and probably others that I'm forgetting.
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I would actually love to put it up for sale through itch.io, but what happens when someone actually buys the game? They have to lie to Oculus and say they're a developer, and we all have to hope that Facebook doesn't Alter The Deal. I wouldn't trust that arrangement after taking someone's money, and I won't give the game out for free either.
Really the answer here is competition. If Quest had a competitor, I could take my game there and tell customers to buy that product instead. But it would be even better if the competition was open source.
Maybe the best you can do is price it low to account for the risk, and put big warnings that it'll only work as long as Facebook continues to allow side-loading. If people still want to buy it, that's on them.
Looked at your profile and I assume we're talking about Soundboxing?
Did Oculus give any feedback on why they won't put it in the store? Looking at your website, I'm thinking it makes heavy use of user-created tracks with the audio being pulled from YouTube (based on the VEVO thumbnails)? Is YouTube ok with that kind of embedding?
The Quest store just put Synth Riders up this week, so clearly it's not a complete ban on games that play unlicensed user-sequenced tracks. But those have to be loaded into a folder on the device from your computer instead of "HAND MADE CHALLENGES" with a Daft Punk song prominently featured in the marketing material.
No, in the many discussions I've had with Oculus, they've not given me a solid reason. If you talk to other developers, it is apparently their policy not to give feedback.
My game embeds a full browser, and can navigate to YouTube pages - it really is a full browser though, showing ads and dutifully registering tracking impressions and everything. But the browser is actually just background noise, the actual challenge is a motion captured artistic performance, and that drives everything in the game - this is well-protected by fair use.
The browser state is just made to sync up with that performance, and the side-effect is that, if the creator of the mocap moved reasonably in line with the music, you feel as if you're moving to the music too, when in fact you're actually interacting with the motion capture.
You might consider feeling out r/oculusquest to see if people would be interested. Or maybe a limited free itch.io version that's restricted to a defined YouTube playlist?
There's a pretty big crowd of people in that community set up for sideloading. Main reasons being Beat Saber mods, Pavlov beta, Tea for God, Virtual Desktop with SteamVR streaming, and probably others that I'm forgetting.