The Unity Dice is an objectively horrible recreation that was constructed to check the bounds of what Quest content material Meta would enable into its uncurated App Lab program. The experiment continues to show its price; now that Meta has dissolved App Lab, The Unity Dice has moved to the principle Quest retailer and proven that Meta is actually hands-off with regards to the scope or high quality of what can get listed in its VR recreation retailer.
For a very long time the one official technique to distribute an app on Quest was to submit it to Meta for guide evaluate. However Meta would solely settle for purposes which met opaque high quality standards, like how a lot content material the app supplied and whether or not it was appropriately polished. This made it troublesome for builders to get smaller or experimental apps in entrance of the Quest viewers, resulting in vital developer outcry for a extra open course of.
That prompted the creation of ‘App Lab’, another distribution strategy for Quest which allowed builders to submit purposes for distribution with none judgement on high quality or scope. But it surely got here with the caveat that App Lab apps wouldn’t be proven in the principle Quest retailer, leaving it as much as builders to level their viewers to the app’s web page.
To check whether or not Meta was going actually hands-off when it got here to the standard of App Lab apps, developer Tony “SkarredGhost” Vitillo created The Unity Dice.
Because the title implies, the app is just a clean Unity atmosphere with a gray dice—that you could’t even work together with. Even on the nice worth of free, this app would have by no means stood an opportunity of creating it onto the principle Quest retailer. However might it make it onto App Lab?
Certainly, Meta allowed The Unity Dice into App Lab, proving it will let absolutely anything into this system, so long as technical necessities have been met and content material pointers have been revered (ie: no grownup or unlawful content material).
It was excellent news that builders might submit any app to App Lab for distribution on Quest with out worrying that Meta would block an app on the grounds that it wasn’t full or polished sufficient. However sentiment remained that having this ‘unlisted’ Quest retailer made it unnecessarily troublesome for builders to seek out prospects.
After a number of years of App Lab, developer stress lastly pushed Meta to dissolve this system, finally merging the App Lab retailer with the principle Quest retailer. This meant anybody might submit an app of any high quality to the principle Quest retailer the place it will be seen to prospects by means of searching and looking out.
Final week The Unity Dice accomplished its journey and have become listed on the principle Quest retailer, together with different App Lab apps, once more proving that Meta could be actually hands-off on curation.
And although it’s nonetheless attainable for builders to mark their Quest apps as “Early Entry”—to inform prospects to anticipate one thing experimental or incomplete—The Unity Dice’s creator joked that “it’s not even in Early Entry as a result of it’s good as it’s!”