Oculus has come under pressure for its approach to curation on Oculus Quest in the past month. Facebook’s VR team is taking a stricter approach than it has on Rift or Go, which has seen some developers turned away from the platform. But Oculus’ Jason Rubin insists that the company will never permanently reject Quest submissions, though developers may be waiting a long time to get approval.
“I will not categorically say no to anything,” Rubin said of VR curation to GameDaily.biz at E3 earlier this month. Instead, he suggested Oculus might support the developer on Rift until a future version of Quest is powerful enough to run it.
“Some developer might come in and go, ‘Listen, we think the future of VR is this type of title. It won’t work on Quest,’” Rubin added. “Let’s just pretend for a second it’s entirely physics-based, and physics is a CPU-intensive process, and at least today, Quest can’t do it. And we think about it, and we go, ‘That’s genius. We’ll fund that for PC,’ because if it works on PC, someday it’s going to work on Quest, and that pushes VR forward. So, that’s the title I would do for PC.”
In other words, Oculus may fund PC VR-only titles with the intention that they one day come to a potential Quest successor. Perhaps that might even be the plan for the company’s Rift-exclusive Studios projects like Lone Echo II and Stormland.
Oculus’ curation policy has paved the way for a new sideloading application called SideQuest. It allows developers to unofficially get their content onto Quest for consumers willing to open their headset up to external sources. However the VR community grows around it, it appears Oculus isn’t backing down on its Quest curation for the time being.
