The Unity Dice is an objectively horrible recreation that was constructed to check the boundaries of what Quest content material Meta would enable into its uncurated App Lab program. The experiment continues to show its value; now that Meta has dissolved App Lab, The Unity Dice has moved to the principle Quest retailer and proven that Meta is really hands-off relating to the scope or high quality of what can get listed in its VR recreation retailer.
For a very long time the one official strategy to distribute an app on Quest was to submit it to Meta for handbook assessment. However Meta would solely settle for purposes which met opaque high quality standards, like how a lot content material the app provided and whether or not it was appropriately polished. This made it tough for builders to get smaller or experimental apps in entrance of the Quest viewers, resulting in important developer outcry for a extra open course of.
That prompted the creation of ‘App Lab’, an alternate distribution method for Quest which allowed builders to submit purposes for distribution with none judgement on high quality or scope. However it 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 identify implies, the app is just a clean Unity atmosphere with a gray dice—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 constructing 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 might let absolutely anything into this system, so long as technical necessities had been met and content material tips had 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 tough for builders to seek out prospects.
After a number of years of App Lab, developer strain 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 might be seen to prospects by means of looking 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 can 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 count on 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!”
