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The Strange history of VO on Oculus VR
Questions have been raised in past threads about the Quest version of the game, why it was extremely delayed, and why we explicitly avoided promoting it when it became available on the Quest App Lab. I'm going to try and answer some of that.
The point here is to give players some sense of security about the future of our Quest development, while also explaining the nature of the historical delays and challenges we went through.
While this is not normally the kind of content I'd be inclined to post publicly, I think the only way I can clarify the background here, for our users, is by being bluntly candid about the history.
Let me start by saying we've been developing games professionally for decades, and the experiences I'm relating below are unusual, at least for us. We had countless successful and happy partnerships with large companies around co-marketing or hardware launches, prior to the advent of VR, including high-profile cases like launching Android tablets with Google and Verizon, which put us at the center of a huge, expensive TV campaign for over a year. We're unfazed by console-style "cert" requirements, or "final polish" for a launch, etc. We're technically very proficient (operating a live MMORPG with a completely custom engine and back-end); this is what we do. This reality is part of what made our problematic experiences in VR so surprising and upsetting..
All that being said, I'm going to start at the beginning, to give some context.
1) We were one of the first Oculus VR developers. Brendan Iribe emailed me, along with several other studio-heads, just as he was founding what would be known as "Oculus". Many of us knew him from his previous company, ScaleForm. Here at Guild we were already pretty passionate about VR, and we independently supported the early Oculus kickstarter, as well as promoting Oculus on our marketing channels in the early days (to hundreds of thousands of people). At that time we seemed to have a pretty solid relationship with Oculus, which was very much still a struggling startup, and supportive of their developers.
2) We spent years iterating on the game for the DK1, DK2 and other prototypes of the Rift. The early days were kind of crazy, as the game engine itself had to do things like compass calibration for the head motion. As time went on, a following of VO players acquired prototype Rift devices and gave feedback on our VR development. This public support for the device probably made us the first "VR MMORPG" (VRMMO) in history, as (according to my press contacts) no one else had officially offered integrated VR support at that time. Perhaps this also makes us the first actual production VR metaverse?
3) When the Rift finally launched, we were shut out of the Oculus Store release. We had a deep relationship with Oculus (or so we thought) and reached out early in the year leading up to the launch, to allow plenty of time for any required changes; but Oculus (now being acquired by Facebook) was not interested in allowing us to launch in their upcoming Rift store, or even in letting us have access to the 1.0 API when that became available. So, we could not even ship for Rift release to our existing players. This was confusing and painful, given our considerable investment and longstanding public support of the device.
(It's tough to say exactly what was going on here, but I'll observe that Brendan and some of the senior "OG" Oculus crew had left by this point, and effectively been replaced by a number of ex-publisher types. These people may have been more focused on building specific "catalogs" of titles, as they often do, and in their mind the "space-game genre" may have been fully occupied by EVE: Valkyrie and Elite: Dangerous. Of course, that's probably not a good strategy to take if you're launching a brand new category of device during a wild-west period of development; but, that kind of decision is also a recurring theme here..).
4) Shortly after Rift launch, someone else within Oculus asked us to create VO for GearVR (the then-nascent mobile-VR collaboration with Samsung), as we had a strong history on mobile by that point. They offered to pay us for development, to offset some costs, and while still stung by our Rift experience, we embarked on the GearVR development. They mandated that it had to be playable with only the headset (we weren't allowed to require a gamepad, and hand-controllers didn't exist yet), so just a single button on the side and a D-Pad, but we did our best..
5) There are some pretty painful stories about GearVR, how Oculus waved off our bug reports about serious problems in their platform (temporarily bricking phones), even after we had Qualcomm validate the Oculus issues independently. Or how Oculus suddenly cancelled our launch, due to their own issues, before eventually reconsidering. Or how they failed to pay us and several other studios for many months after their contractually mandated deadline. Or, how they used VO to publicly promote and launch a new VR-capable phone, but then never tested the actual game on that phone (which was a non-US model, and unavailable to us), resulting in a GPU driver bug (shader compiler issue) being widely blamed on "the game" instead of "the phone".
6) Thankfully, VO for GearVR had pretty positive critical responses. We beat out Minecraft and all other VR games in some of the top-10 lists of the time. We priced it pretty cheaply ($2.99), but discovery was a challenge, and we didn't have much promotion on the store. Most other, comparable games tended to be priced much higher; probably viewed by Oculus as yielding better margins for store promotion, and certainly giving better income to the developers (other devs who tried free-to-play on GearVR basically failed to generate meaningful revenue). Our GearVR version was pretty groundbreaking for the time; I don't think anyone else had fully integrated voice chat, text-to-speech and speech-to-text, all in a VR game on a mobile device.
7) In early 2018, the Oculus Go shipped, and a bunch of our GearVR players bought them on day-one. But, we had no idea this device was even in development (we're a small, busy studio operating a cross-platform liveops MMO), Oculus hadn't reached out to us in advance, as they had previously, or sent us any hardware for testing, and as a result our game was not available in the store on day-one. This lead to a big thread on our forums, asking where the Go support was, which I passed on to Oculus, who then seemed to kind of panic about a potential PR issue. We acquired a Go in the coming weeks, and ported the game; and in the interim period we missed out on a lot of the drama that was associated with the Go launch instabilities (which, frankly, was preferable). Still, the fact that Oculus would ship a major new device without us, one of their better-known partners at the time, was unusual compared to their prior behavior on mobile-VR.
8) Fast forward to a a few months later in 2018: Oculus is building a new device, which will eventually be called the "Quest". They don't want to repeat the PR problem from the Go, and go to great lengths to ship us lots of prototype hardware from a relatively early stage. We're told verbally that we're a "top tier partner" and "one of the first fifty titles intended to launch". Critically, we're told "your game does not require Oculus project approval", we were "fast-tracked" past this requirement being placed on other developers, meaning we don't have to submit early builds to them. Again, our reviews, critical response and sell-through all supported this, so that didn't seem unusual. The Quest seemed great.. everything we had been hoping for in a standalone device. So, we poured on the coals to be a near-launch title for the new device.
9) Early 2019, we spent a month separately iterating on our engine and renderer with Qualcomm, optimizing architecturally for the Snapdragon 835 + Adreno 540 GPU (powering the Quest). Oculus had told us Vulkan was "feature-complete", but, it turned out it totally wasn't. Still, we reported some bugs and helped their internal graphics teams a bit, before we switched back to ES3, since their Vulkan support wasn't ready for prime-time at that point. At the time we were one of the only custom-engine developers on the platform (probably still true today).
10) Spring 2019, things are shaping up pretty well, the game is pretty solid, and the Quest is approaching initial hardware launch (May). At this point we're getting confident enough to start scheduling our own formal launch date. I reach out to Oculus, aiming for sometime in August, to give us some extra time to iterate and polish. We're incredibly excited about the launch, and we expect the game to be one of the best content offerings on the platform. Notably, we've been continuously in touch with Oculus throughout this development, communicating every few days and weeks on various development shifts, technical issues and concerns, plus occasional calls; the partnership has been solid up to that point.
11) Within a few days of asking about launch dates, Oculus starts to act strangely, becoming kind of vague and evasive, and saying they have to discuss things internally. Eventually, they tell us that Vendetta Online will never ship on the Quest. There's no rationale provided. There's no "product quality" issue, because, again, Oculus has never actually seen the Quest version, as we were "fast tracked" past title approval. However, I can add that while the title was incomplete, the quality was solid (essentially the same product has 4.6 stars on the current Quest App Store, as I write this in 2025). We've burned six months (self-funded) at "crunch intensity" for a title, that we legitimately think is going to be great, only to be told that it will never be allowed on the platform store, for no discernible logical reason. At that point we're gutted, demoralized, and.. I'm very angry, frankly.
12) Still, at the time I truly can't wrap my brain around their response, and I assume this must be some kind of bizarre misunderstanding. On my last call with our "Oculus rep" at the time, I ask if we can meet up at the then-upcoming "E3" game conference to discuss whatever issues or concerns they had (face-to-face meetings often help to resolve confusion and problems). They agree. That's the last I hear from Oculus for probably five years. All attempts to ping them after that are radio-silence, and no one will meet with me at E3, GDC, or anywhere else. A lot of people also leave Oculus around this time.
13) Fast forward years later, Oculus launches the "Quest App Lab" concept (kind of a "second-class, hidden store" for people who aren't shipped in the main store), and we eventually decide to put the old prototype version of the Quest 1 game on there, and see what happens (particularly, would Oculus / Meta remove it? Do they hate MMOs, some kind of "rival metaverse" thing? Or just us specifically? We have no idea). We don't announce anything about the release publicly, and we don't expect anyone to realize it's even available (Lab titles weren't shown or discoverable on the store without explicit searches by full name, at the time). However, it turns out.. the public did find it, it gets posted to SideQuest (not by us), and all of a sudden we were being asked about it.
14) At the same time, we were getting strange administrative Store messages from Oculus / Meta, saying that the title might be removed from the store, or demanding that we add things into the game, and then demanding a few months later that we then remove the same things from the game that they had previously required us to add. It was very.. odd. Again, at this time we have no actual communicative relationship with Oculus / Meta, all we get are these weird one-way messages that show up in the Store administrative interface, like a pronouncement from heaven, telling us we must immediately do X, Y or Z. We try to comply, but given how we were historically told the game would "never" ship on the store, and now we're being told it might be removed, we have little confidence in the game's status.. and we tell players as much, being put in the weird position of having to tell people "maybe don't buy our game, we don't know how long it'll be playable on this device". We didn't want people to be burned by something out of our control, or end up wasting their money.
15) 2024-2025: Finally, at long last, we connect with people we know at Oculus / Meta (recent hires, but long-time industry people), and are back to having some kind of direct relationship with the company. Which doesn't necessarily mean that we won't be driven-over again by some strange policy choice at Meta, but at least gives us some means of.. talking to people? As a result of this, we start to put more effort into the Quest version, which is still largely just the 2019 prototype we made for Quest 1 launch (the only difference for Q2 and Q3 were configuration tweaks of the existing engine, maybe 20 minutes of effort).
16) This brings us up to Today, and where we currently stand. We support our Quest version, and we expect to invest more into it. We're still passionate about VR. But, I should bluntly mention a few learnings that come from this set of experiences listed above:
- We have probably spent seven figures on VR, and made five figures.
- While I still love VR personally, chasing it was probably one of the worst business decisions I ever made.
Still, we wanted to ship the Quest release in some form, to at least bring it to our historical GearVR and Go userbase, many of whom were angry at us, as they were disappointed when the Quest version was never forthcoming (although no one was more disappointed than us).
We consider Quest to be a tier-1 supported platform of our game, like Windows or Android. We continue to actively try and fix any major problems quickly.
It's still possible that the Quest version could drastically increase in popularity and become a big revenue generator for us, I don't rule that out. I continue to maintain the opinion that our game, a true six-DOF space MMORPG, is one of the best actual use-cases for the Quest family of devices. An opinion supported by player feedback.
But, while I deeply appreciate the positive player responses, given my experience related above, it's probably understandable that I'm pretty skeptical about ever "breaking even" on the Quest version, in terms of our historical costs.
I hope this is helpful. All the best. Thanks for playing the game.
The point here is to give players some sense of security about the future of our Quest development, while also explaining the nature of the historical delays and challenges we went through.
While this is not normally the kind of content I'd be inclined to post publicly, I think the only way I can clarify the background here, for our users, is by being bluntly candid about the history.
Let me start by saying we've been developing games professionally for decades, and the experiences I'm relating below are unusual, at least for us. We had countless successful and happy partnerships with large companies around co-marketing or hardware launches, prior to the advent of VR, including high-profile cases like launching Android tablets with Google and Verizon, which put us at the center of a huge, expensive TV campaign for over a year. We're unfazed by console-style "cert" requirements, or "final polish" for a launch, etc. We're technically very proficient (operating a live MMORPG with a completely custom engine and back-end); this is what we do. This reality is part of what made our problematic experiences in VR so surprising and upsetting..
All that being said, I'm going to start at the beginning, to give some context.
1) We were one of the first Oculus VR developers. Brendan Iribe emailed me, along with several other studio-heads, just as he was founding what would be known as "Oculus". Many of us knew him from his previous company, ScaleForm. Here at Guild we were already pretty passionate about VR, and we independently supported the early Oculus kickstarter, as well as promoting Oculus on our marketing channels in the early days (to hundreds of thousands of people). At that time we seemed to have a pretty solid relationship with Oculus, which was very much still a struggling startup, and supportive of their developers.
2) We spent years iterating on the game for the DK1, DK2 and other prototypes of the Rift. The early days were kind of crazy, as the game engine itself had to do things like compass calibration for the head motion. As time went on, a following of VO players acquired prototype Rift devices and gave feedback on our VR development. This public support for the device probably made us the first "VR MMORPG" (VRMMO) in history, as (according to my press contacts) no one else had officially offered integrated VR support at that time. Perhaps this also makes us the first actual production VR metaverse?
3) When the Rift finally launched, we were shut out of the Oculus Store release. We had a deep relationship with Oculus (or so we thought) and reached out early in the year leading up to the launch, to allow plenty of time for any required changes; but Oculus (now being acquired by Facebook) was not interested in allowing us to launch in their upcoming Rift store, or even in letting us have access to the 1.0 API when that became available. So, we could not even ship for Rift release to our existing players. This was confusing and painful, given our considerable investment and longstanding public support of the device.
(It's tough to say exactly what was going on here, but I'll observe that Brendan and some of the senior "OG" Oculus crew had left by this point, and effectively been replaced by a number of ex-publisher types. These people may have been more focused on building specific "catalogs" of titles, as they often do, and in their mind the "space-game genre" may have been fully occupied by EVE: Valkyrie and Elite: Dangerous. Of course, that's probably not a good strategy to take if you're launching a brand new category of device during a wild-west period of development; but, that kind of decision is also a recurring theme here..).
4) Shortly after Rift launch, someone else within Oculus asked us to create VO for GearVR (the then-nascent mobile-VR collaboration with Samsung), as we had a strong history on mobile by that point. They offered to pay us for development, to offset some costs, and while still stung by our Rift experience, we embarked on the GearVR development. They mandated that it had to be playable with only the headset (we weren't allowed to require a gamepad, and hand-controllers didn't exist yet), so just a single button on the side and a D-Pad, but we did our best..
5) There are some pretty painful stories about GearVR, how Oculus waved off our bug reports about serious problems in their platform (temporarily bricking phones), even after we had Qualcomm validate the Oculus issues independently. Or how Oculus suddenly cancelled our launch, due to their own issues, before eventually reconsidering. Or how they failed to pay us and several other studios for many months after their contractually mandated deadline. Or, how they used VO to publicly promote and launch a new VR-capable phone, but then never tested the actual game on that phone (which was a non-US model, and unavailable to us), resulting in a GPU driver bug (shader compiler issue) being widely blamed on "the game" instead of "the phone".
6) Thankfully, VO for GearVR had pretty positive critical responses. We beat out Minecraft and all other VR games in some of the top-10 lists of the time. We priced it pretty cheaply ($2.99), but discovery was a challenge, and we didn't have much promotion on the store. Most other, comparable games tended to be priced much higher; probably viewed by Oculus as yielding better margins for store promotion, and certainly giving better income to the developers (other devs who tried free-to-play on GearVR basically failed to generate meaningful revenue). Our GearVR version was pretty groundbreaking for the time; I don't think anyone else had fully integrated voice chat, text-to-speech and speech-to-text, all in a VR game on a mobile device.
7) In early 2018, the Oculus Go shipped, and a bunch of our GearVR players bought them on day-one. But, we had no idea this device was even in development (we're a small, busy studio operating a cross-platform liveops MMO), Oculus hadn't reached out to us in advance, as they had previously, or sent us any hardware for testing, and as a result our game was not available in the store on day-one. This lead to a big thread on our forums, asking where the Go support was, which I passed on to Oculus, who then seemed to kind of panic about a potential PR issue. We acquired a Go in the coming weeks, and ported the game; and in the interim period we missed out on a lot of the drama that was associated with the Go launch instabilities (which, frankly, was preferable). Still, the fact that Oculus would ship a major new device without us, one of their better-known partners at the time, was unusual compared to their prior behavior on mobile-VR.
8) Fast forward to a a few months later in 2018: Oculus is building a new device, which will eventually be called the "Quest". They don't want to repeat the PR problem from the Go, and go to great lengths to ship us lots of prototype hardware from a relatively early stage. We're told verbally that we're a "top tier partner" and "one of the first fifty titles intended to launch". Critically, we're told "your game does not require Oculus project approval", we were "fast-tracked" past this requirement being placed on other developers, meaning we don't have to submit early builds to them. Again, our reviews, critical response and sell-through all supported this, so that didn't seem unusual. The Quest seemed great.. everything we had been hoping for in a standalone device. So, we poured on the coals to be a near-launch title for the new device.
9) Early 2019, we spent a month separately iterating on our engine and renderer with Qualcomm, optimizing architecturally for the Snapdragon 835 + Adreno 540 GPU (powering the Quest). Oculus had told us Vulkan was "feature-complete", but, it turned out it totally wasn't. Still, we reported some bugs and helped their internal graphics teams a bit, before we switched back to ES3, since their Vulkan support wasn't ready for prime-time at that point. At the time we were one of the only custom-engine developers on the platform (probably still true today).
10) Spring 2019, things are shaping up pretty well, the game is pretty solid, and the Quest is approaching initial hardware launch (May). At this point we're getting confident enough to start scheduling our own formal launch date. I reach out to Oculus, aiming for sometime in August, to give us some extra time to iterate and polish. We're incredibly excited about the launch, and we expect the game to be one of the best content offerings on the platform. Notably, we've been continuously in touch with Oculus throughout this development, communicating every few days and weeks on various development shifts, technical issues and concerns, plus occasional calls; the partnership has been solid up to that point.
11) Within a few days of asking about launch dates, Oculus starts to act strangely, becoming kind of vague and evasive, and saying they have to discuss things internally. Eventually, they tell us that Vendetta Online will never ship on the Quest. There's no rationale provided. There's no "product quality" issue, because, again, Oculus has never actually seen the Quest version, as we were "fast tracked" past title approval. However, I can add that while the title was incomplete, the quality was solid (essentially the same product has 4.6 stars on the current Quest App Store, as I write this in 2025). We've burned six months (self-funded) at "crunch intensity" for a title, that we legitimately think is going to be great, only to be told that it will never be allowed on the platform store, for no discernible logical reason. At that point we're gutted, demoralized, and.. I'm very angry, frankly.
12) Still, at the time I truly can't wrap my brain around their response, and I assume this must be some kind of bizarre misunderstanding. On my last call with our "Oculus rep" at the time, I ask if we can meet up at the then-upcoming "E3" game conference to discuss whatever issues or concerns they had (face-to-face meetings often help to resolve confusion and problems). They agree. That's the last I hear from Oculus for probably five years. All attempts to ping them after that are radio-silence, and no one will meet with me at E3, GDC, or anywhere else. A lot of people also leave Oculus around this time.
13) Fast forward years later, Oculus launches the "Quest App Lab" concept (kind of a "second-class, hidden store" for people who aren't shipped in the main store), and we eventually decide to put the old prototype version of the Quest 1 game on there, and see what happens (particularly, would Oculus / Meta remove it? Do they hate MMOs, some kind of "rival metaverse" thing? Or just us specifically? We have no idea). We don't announce anything about the release publicly, and we don't expect anyone to realize it's even available (Lab titles weren't shown or discoverable on the store without explicit searches by full name, at the time). However, it turns out.. the public did find it, it gets posted to SideQuest (not by us), and all of a sudden we were being asked about it.
14) At the same time, we were getting strange administrative Store messages from Oculus / Meta, saying that the title might be removed from the store, or demanding that we add things into the game, and then demanding a few months later that we then remove the same things from the game that they had previously required us to add. It was very.. odd. Again, at this time we have no actual communicative relationship with Oculus / Meta, all we get are these weird one-way messages that show up in the Store administrative interface, like a pronouncement from heaven, telling us we must immediately do X, Y or Z. We try to comply, but given how we were historically told the game would "never" ship on the store, and now we're being told it might be removed, we have little confidence in the game's status.. and we tell players as much, being put in the weird position of having to tell people "maybe don't buy our game, we don't know how long it'll be playable on this device". We didn't want people to be burned by something out of our control, or end up wasting their money.
15) 2024-2025: Finally, at long last, we connect with people we know at Oculus / Meta (recent hires, but long-time industry people), and are back to having some kind of direct relationship with the company. Which doesn't necessarily mean that we won't be driven-over again by some strange policy choice at Meta, but at least gives us some means of.. talking to people? As a result of this, we start to put more effort into the Quest version, which is still largely just the 2019 prototype we made for Quest 1 launch (the only difference for Q2 and Q3 were configuration tweaks of the existing engine, maybe 20 minutes of effort).
16) This brings us up to Today, and where we currently stand. We support our Quest version, and we expect to invest more into it. We're still passionate about VR. But, I should bluntly mention a few learnings that come from this set of experiences listed above:
- We have probably spent seven figures on VR, and made five figures.
- While I still love VR personally, chasing it was probably one of the worst business decisions I ever made.
Still, we wanted to ship the Quest release in some form, to at least bring it to our historical GearVR and Go userbase, many of whom were angry at us, as they were disappointed when the Quest version was never forthcoming (although no one was more disappointed than us).
We consider Quest to be a tier-1 supported platform of our game, like Windows or Android. We continue to actively try and fix any major problems quickly.
It's still possible that the Quest version could drastically increase in popularity and become a big revenue generator for us, I don't rule that out. I continue to maintain the opinion that our game, a true six-DOF space MMORPG, is one of the best actual use-cases for the Quest family of devices. An opinion supported by player feedback.
But, while I deeply appreciate the positive player responses, given my experience related above, it's probably understandable that I'm pretty skeptical about ever "breaking even" on the Quest version, in terms of our historical costs.
I hope this is helpful. All the best. Thanks for playing the game.