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Chris Pruett - Director of Ecosystem

rosebud_the_sle
Expert Protege
Hi folks! My name is Chris Pruett, and I am the Director of Ecosystem for Content here at Oculus. I joined Oculus in 2014 and have spent the last four and a half years helping developers build better VR apps and games. Before that I ran a game studio, worked on Android at Google, and even further back, shipped a bunch of games for consoles. I'm a big fan of horror games.



I'm happy to answer your questions about VR engineering, game design, or market success. Please only post a question once, we'll see it!
59 REPLIES 59

rosebud_the_sle
Expert Protege
We're looking for titles that will connect with the Quest audience. We are absolutely open to weird, artsy games (which describes some of my favorite titles!) as long as they are polished and high-quality. Our core goal is to ensure that everything in our store finds an audience that wants to engage, whether that be a mainstream title or a niche. My advice here is to focus on making the artistry of your work shine. Tell us the story of your title and why you got excited about it when you submit a concept document.

tipatat
Explorer
Hi Chris - Thanks for doing this! 

Back in Oct 17, 2017, Jason Rubin said "More than 8 VR Titles Have Made $1M+ in the Oculus store alone"
https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-multiple-vr-titles-made-1m-oculus-store-alone/

I was hoping you can share updated data on how many titles have passed $1M by now and also what's the most revenue a title on the Oculus Store can generate - $5m? $10m? 

This kind of data is really helpful for devs for budget planning and also for others to know the health of the VR ecosystem.  

Thanks for being awesome! The Dead Secret series rocks!

Preston_Jong
Protege
My current game in development for the Rift is very much a niche game being marketed towards Alien conspiracy enthusiasts.  I plan to see how the game could be adapted for Quest for maybe a larger audience.  If a Quest submission is rejected will reasons and feedback be given on what we should do to modify the proposal?   Or should we move on to the next game concept and find one that does pass?  My company is not lacking in ideas for games. 

rosebud_the_sle
Expert Protege
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun to make.

Quest is significantly faster than Oculus Go from both a CPU and GPU perspective. Part of this is just the raw performance of the chipset itself, but a lot of it has to do with the effort we've put into the design of the headset and the core rendering architecture. Tracking isn't in contention with and doesn't affect the performance of your application.

socialarvr
Honored Guest
Will there be social VR apps like Facebook Spaces on the Quest?

rosebud_the_sle
Expert Protege
Hi! I'm not sure I understand your question. The development process for Rift is pretty well defined and we don't anticipate any major changes to it in the near future. Did you mean to ask about Quest?

rosebud_the_sle
Expert Protege
Hi Tipatat! Generally we don't talk about the success of our partners, but I can say that our store has grown since Jason's statement. We're seeing some of the early success stories in VR come back with their second or third title, which tend to be bigger and more ambitious, which should give you some signal. We've also seen new titles rocket to success at a much faster rate thanks to the larger pool of VR headsets in the world.

rosebud_the_sle
Expert Protege
I am a sucker for alien conspiracy theories. Please tell me you have an alien autopsy mini-game.

When submitting a concept to us, I think it's worthwhile to consider that your title may have access to a much wider audience than you initially intended. How can you talk to that audience without watering-down the content for your core enthusiasts? This is a hard game design problem, but it's worth considering folks who will just skim across the surface of your title as well as the folks that want to go deep down the rabbit hole. If you can service both audiences you have a good shot at success! Explaining how you address these audiences is a good thing to include in your concept document.

When it comes to feedback, we generally do not give feedback (beyond technical VRC failures) for applications or concepts that we reject. However, you can continue to work on the concept and submit it again in the future. Or you could move forward with production, ship on Rift, and use your success there as an argument for Quest. But when you do submit a concept document, please make it as real and as complete as possible.

rosebud_the_sle
Expert Protege
For JacksonGordon's second question:

In a more specific and personal question, I'm having issues with a screen overlay effect I had working on the Go. I'm porting the app to the Rift, and the overlay doesn't seem to be working now. No errors, but the effect isn't happening.I'm wondering if the Rift handles screen overlays and textures differently than the Go.T he goal is to add a vignette mask during movement to reduce periphery, thereby reducing vection. Also if there would be a different/better way to achieve this on the Rift that would be awesome, I'm relatively green to VR dev. Thanks for your time!


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  1. Depending on whether you are working in Unity, Unreal, or some other engine, the API for overlays (which are called “compositor layers” on Rift) is similar but not exactly the same. In Unity we abstract both platforms to the same interface (OVROverlay), but the parameters and behaviors differ a bit between the PC and Go runtimes. The documentation for this is here: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/latest/concepts/unity-ovroverlay/


CarpetHead
Honored Guest
Hi Chris,

I just want to vent: the most annoying thing about working with oculus is the fact that the oculus store software automatically launches when it "thinks" you are "using the headset".

If you leave the headset in a position where the proximity sensor is triggered, often by the facial interface or head strap itself, and a fly lands on your desk, the oculus store opens immediately. This is really annoying when you are using your computer for something else, like gaming (a lot of oculus users happen to be gamers right). It really sucks to be in an intense moment of a game, and you accidentally tap your desk, oculus launches, restarts the graphics drivers, and causes a 5 second period where you can't use your computer

Why on earth can't we turn off that behaviour?