Meta Sparks Anger By Charging For VR Apps

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Meta is facing a growing backlash for the charges imposed on apps created for its virtual reality headsets, as developers complain about the commercial terms set around futuristic devices that the company hopes will help create a multibillion-dollar consumer market. [...] But several developers told the Financial Times of their frustration that Meta, which is seen as having an early lead in a nascent market, has insisted on a charging model for its VR app store similar to what exists today on smartphones. This is despite Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg being strongly critical in the past of charging policies on existing mobile app stores.

"Don't confuse marketing with reality -- it's good marketing to pick on Apple. But it doesn't mean Meta won't do the exact same thing," said Seth Siegel, global head of AI and cyber security at Infosys Consulting. "There is no impetus for them to be better." The "Quest Store" for Meta's Quest 2, by far the most popular VR headset on the market, takes a 30 percent cut from digital purchases and charges 15-30 percent on subscriptions, similar to the fees charged by Apple and Android. "Undoubtedly there are services provided -- they build amazing hardware and provide store services," said Daniel Sproll, chief executive of Realities.io, an immersive realities start-up behind the VR game Puzzling Places. "But the problem is that it feels like everybody agreed on this 30 percent and that's what we're stuck with. It doesn't feel like there's any competition. The Chinese companies coming out with headsets are the same. Why would they change it?"

Meta defended its policies, pointing out that unlike iPhone owners, Quest users can install apps outside its official store through SideQuest, a third-party app store, or make use of App Lab, its less restricted, more experimental app store. "We want to foster choice and competition in the VR ecosystem," Meta said. "And it's working -- our efforts have produced a material financial return for developers: as we announced earlier this year, over $1 billion has been spent on games and apps in the Meta Quest Store." Developers welcome these alternatives but say their impact is limited. SideQuest has been downloaded just 396,000 times, versus 19 million for the Oculus app, according to Sensor Tower. App Lab, meanwhile, still takes a 30 percent cut of purchases. Developers are also frustrated with Meta's shift to a more restrictive approach to allowing apps on its VR app store.

Chris Pruett, Meta's content ecosystem director, said Meta found that lax standards resulted in too many users being frustrated by low-quality content, so the company has opted to play more of a gatekeeper role. But developers said the resulting barriers could lack transparency.

"Getting something on the Quest store is painful," said Lyron Bentovim, chief executive of the Glimpse Group, an immersive experiences group. "It's significantly worse than getting on Apple or Android stores."

FB is hurting VR adoption

[_0x0nyadesu]

I refuse to use anything made by Facebook so it's dead on arrival.

Holding out for Valve Index.

Re:

[Reiyuki]

You could see the writing on the wall when they bought-out Oculus, fired most of the engineers and replaced all the streamlined code with marketeering wank

Re:

[Anonymouse Cowtard]

At least in the Android ecosystem you can get in with cheap hardware, the price of which is offset by the fact of you being locked-in (or bundled ununinstalable crapware).

Apple and Fecebook extort you with the hardware prices and extort you with the app prices. If you're a developer, you get extorted a third time and they act like you should be thankful for this.

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[not flu]

Quest 2 is sold at a very significant loss to push more units. This is just the traditional game console business model, sell the consoles at a loss, make profit off games with licensing fees.

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[znrt]

Holding out for Valve Index.

valve index released years ago. what's holding you back?

Re: FB is hurting VR adoption

[_0x0nyadesu]

Space in my house

Meta is destroying VR

[backslashdot]

Meta is destroying VR for at least a generation. Releasing mediocre low-res headsets. It's 2022 they should have gotten to 8K per eye by now. Minumum.

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[znrt]

relax. they aint destroying anything, and there are no miracles. they are just releasing regular start of the art tech with a lot of hype for something that will happen (possibly) in 10-15 years time.

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[youngone]

The vast corporation I work for bought two Microsoft Hololens 2 VR headsets, intending to use them for training during our SAP rollout.
I set one up and gave it to one of the Warehouse guys who was going to be doing the training. I picked the warehouse guy who is keen on new tech and is perfectly capable of figuring things out for himself if there are roadblocks. He was thrilled.

Nice, I thought. This will work well.

A couple of days later he bought it back, telling me it wouldn't focus so he got a heada

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[znrt]

well, well, your anecdotal experience is appreciated but it is till anecdotal. i don't know what exactly was the intended use and how good (or bad) the particular implementation was. specifically you mention SAP which would actually send shivers down any spine.

this is emergent tech, smoke/bullshit solutions are to be expected. however the hololens is indeed one impressive piece of equipment, i'm pretty sure it can fill many spots very well if coded by the right hands and placed in the right hands for use.

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[not flu]

VR tech has a long long way to go before it's "good enough" for much. That said all the issues you mentioned needn't be that bad and are all to some extent specific to the Hololens. Focusing issues is the most general to all of currently available VR, but there's a lot of work being done on varifocal optics to let the displays let you focus your eyes on objects at varying distances. The headset not fitting the head is just a question of old fashioned physical design (and there are many models of 3rd party h

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[JThundley]

You bought The Microsoft product and are surprised it doesn't work well?!

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[bill_mcgonigle]

> It's 2022 they should have gotten to 8K per eye by now.

Who makes those panels? Or was Facebook supposed to go into the display business? How long do those factories take to build and then jump to the front of the line ahead of the folks doing it for 30 years?

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[Opportunist]

Well, at this point they ain't holding back anything. 8k an eye would be great, but what GPU you can actually buy somewhere without having to refinance your house would drive it?

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[thegarbz]

Meta is destroying VR for at least a generation.

They are doing nothing of the sort. The Oculus store has always taken a cut from developers. Shock horror Valve does it too. Both the Oculus and SteamVR APIs are open enough that you can run software entirely without either store being involved.

Releasing mediocre low-res headsets. It's 2022 they should have gotten to 8K per eye by now.

If you want high end hardware buy high end hardware. What is holding back VR is the cost which is still very much in early adopter territory and the computing power (high resolution headsets are universally tethered). Not everyone gives a shit about 8K per eye displa

hold your horses

[znrt]

obvious and totally irrelevant information brought to you by attention whore "infosys consulting". let's just give them a warm round of applauses and move on. /. has to live off something i guess :D

They botched it in 2016

[Kremmy]

Oculus with Facebook Money had the potential to define what it means to be a virtual reality computing platform and frankly they blew it. Their platform needed to be a little more coherent and cohesive. They had some good software packaged in at first, Medium and Quill, but they were both abandoned and given to other companies. What would have been better, instead of focusing on the Storefront, instead of making Oculus Home a loot box platform, is if they tried to create a virtual reality operating environment for the developers. They didn't even have to do the work themselves, they could have given us bloat-free drivers for each operating system allowing someone else to build the VR environment they wouldn't. It would have been awesome to start porting Linux user interfaces to VR if they just released the damn driver. As it happened, they screwed the pooch on making it possible, and I'm still bummed.

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[thegarbz]

Honestly you're talking about a lot of completely irrelevant crap. Home, Medium, Quill, three things that basically no one ever uses. They put on their headsets and fire up games largely from other developers. In 2016 Oculus at least put effort into kickstarting VR by actively funding 3rd party development of games via Oculus Studios which has given us a great many awesome experiences and shown the world that VR is a viable thing to develop for.

That's *all* we need from these Metafucks. Develop hardware, an

Re:

[Kremmy]

They became completely irrelevant, but they didn't have to be. History is rarely irrelevant nonsense.

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[thegarbz]

but they didn't have to be

My point is I'm glad that they are irrelevant. I want VR hardware to be open to development from anyone, not a locked down walled garden ala iPhone restricted to first party approved and managed apps.

The most amazing thing about a Windows PC is the ability to run all sorts of software not written by Microsoft. They didn't "blow it" by failing to make Home something special. IMO the fact that the software Oculus ships with is ignorable is its best feature.

Profit

[fermion]

I was friends with a couple small shop owners back in the day. One was a service provider, but also sold related products. The manufacturer like got 20% of the sale with all the markups to retail. Talking to another owner, the CD section was the smallest as labels only gave retail about 25%. The way to fix this is Walmart and Amazon which can tolerate lower margins. Right now the market is 30%. 70% to the creator is really good. When a Walmart comes in and works for lower margins, they are also going to ask for lower prices.

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[ghoul]

Cant compare retail stores with digital storefronts. Retail stores have real costs like real estate, manpower, shrinkage, cost of inventory. Digital storefronts have only server costs so 10% is fair. If they also provide development tools another 10% or better yet a yearly license fee which covers the tools development cost. 30% is just being greedy.

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[fermion]

So markup at retail is 50% and digital is 30%. Next argument is digital cost nothing so it should be free.

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[ghoul]

Can you say that again? Wasnt really clear what you were trying to say

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[NoMoreACs]

Cant compare retail stores with digital storefronts. Retail stores have real costs like real estate, manpower, shrinkage, cost of inventory. Digital storefronts have only server costs so 10% is fair. If they also provide development tools another 10% or better yet a yearly license fee which covers the tools development cost. 30% is just being greedy.

I guess those servers and associated infrastructure install and maintain themselves, and, and, and. . .

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[Opportunist]

I find the change from cancer to metastasis quite fitting.

Honestly

[JustNiz]

It's not like there isn't already tons of data around how Zuckerberg operates.
At this point, anyone that buys anything from a Zuckerberg company deserves all the abuse they inevitably get.