Meta should improve its Store to support more its developers

There is a bit of turmoil in the VR developer communities because developers are experiencing more difficulties in making their games noticed on Quest. They are all asking Meta to take action, otherwise they risk going out of business. Let me tell you the main complaints, some possible solutions, and why it is important to speak about this.

The merging of App Lab

The problem

I’ve always hated the curation of the Meta Store that relegated us indie developers to the secondary “App Lab” store. I’ve always thought that made no sense to divide developers into Class A and Class B developers and that everyone should have the same opportunity to publish his own game and make it visible to the community, hoping that it can become a hit. It’s fair this way. So when App Lab was eliminated and all the games were merged into the main (Quest) Horizon Store, I was very happy.

But the problem is that the Horizon Store was probably not ready for this merge. App Lab contained both interesting indie games and cheap experiments. After the operation, many people complained about the fact that their home page of the store was just full of shovelware, and others that they were suggested mediocre content. I remember one guy saying that he was suggested to play “Orilla Tag”, a clear rip-off of Gorilla Tag (I wonder if there is also a “Rilla Tag”, “Illa Tag”, and so on, until the most infamous of them all, that is called just “G”). This means that the system that is suggesting to people the game to play is not working very well, and is giving visibility to crappy content that no one wants to play instead of rewarding little gems made by indies.

Together with the suggestion engine, there is also another big problem in the store, which is the Search Engine. Finding games using a part of the name is not always easy: sometimes the wanted game does not appear, or it is not the first result, and so on. This means that if someone wants to find a game that saw a couple of days ago in a Youtube video and so he only remembers some vague resemblance to the name, he may not find it. And these are all lost sales for the developer of that game.

A possible solution

There is one simple solution for the search functionality: Meta should fix it. Searching the web is not a mysterious topic anymore, and there are many algorithms for that. Considering Meta’s budget, I imagine it is just a matter of making this a priority and taking the time to fix it.

As for the suggestion engine, it is always been a problem since the Gear VR times, when people started receiving nonsense notifications like “Since you liked Arizona Sunshine, go playing Hello Kitty Word 2000” and published them on Reddit so that we all could have a laugh. I think it’s time to fix it once and for all: in this case, it is not so trivial as fixing the search functionality, though.

There is not a single standard for suggesting something to users, but there are different strategies out there. And there are also different characteristics through which you can choose the content to suggest: for instance, what has more weight, the type of content (e.g. action vs adventure), its length (short vs long), the reviews it had, or the previous history of the user? The algorithm has to choose how to mix all of these things to give the user a good set of suggestions. It’s not easy, but a company like Meta, which is also one of the leaders in the AI sector (think about the Llama models…), should be able to carry on this task.

But there is even a bigger problem, that is how to create a good mix of certified quality games and hidden gems. One naive approach would be to allow all games on the store, but give visibility (by ranking them higher in the searches or putting them in the Featured section) only to the ones by teams that are certified to make good games. But this would de-facto shadow ban all the indie games from new small teams, creating a situation very similar to the one we had before with App Lab. The solution would be in my opinion to create a mix between the two: on the front page of the store that is customized for every user, the system should provide most suggestions that are known games (e.g. Batman: Arkham Shadow, Gorilla Tag, Max Mustard) and then leave a few slots to unknown games that may be hidden gems that the user may like. Then the system should track how many of these suggested unknown games are actually getting good play time and positive reviews, and the more they perform well in terms of engagement, the more they should be promoted up in the rankings. The ones that are played and mostly disregarded, instead, should be given always less visibility, even if they come from well-established companies. I believe this would be a fair treatment because games would be the facto evaluated by their users: the more a title is liked by the Quest users, the more would become a hit worth being showcased.

The visibility of Horizon Worlds

The problem

It’s been since ages that Meta has tried to make a successful Social VR application. Its last one is Horizon Worlds, which was marketed as the ultimate social VR experience and launched with much hype, but that never had massive success. Competitors like VRChat and Rec Room always had more users and the press mocked Facebook, a social company, for not being able to create a compelling social VR experience. Since Meta invested a lot of money in Horizon and absolutely wants to dominate the social XR space, because social brings lots of things with it (including the data of people), it started to shovel into our throats Horizon Worlds everywhere. If you open the Meta Horizon app on your phone, you will notice that the home page is all about Horizon Worlds worlds and to open the actual store of apps, you have to click on a tiny button in the upper-left corner or scroll down the page for a while. When you launch your Quest, the first tab that opens is the “Horizon Feed”, which suggests a mix of games, Horizon Worlds worlds, and videos from Youtube creators (and I have never asked for the last two things). When you search for something in the Store, the Store tells you both games and Horizon Store destinations with that name. Sometimes even the game suggestions are not about games but about Horizon Worlds places. At the latest Meta Connect, Meta proposed a re-design of the Quest runtime, and guess what? There was an easy way to go to Horizon Worlds portals…

I understand that there are some managers in Meta that have to reach their annual goals and so they are doing everything to have a certain number of users in Horizon by the end of the year. But this is creating issues for everyone. As a user, I find the mobile app totally unusable: it should make it easy for me to buy games and configure my Quest, while it makes it easy to go to Horizon Worlds or to configure my Meta Avatar (that is mostly useful for Horizon Worlds). As a developer, I find it frustrating that my content has to compete not only with the other games on the store but also with Horizon Worlds destinations, which are even given priority on mobile. Someone is also complaining that some people prefer a free mediocre Horizon World ripoff destination to the original paid game on the Meta Store. Again, this is hampering the sales of content on Meta Store.

I would also add that I wonder if there can also be legal implications attached to what Meta is doing. I’m not a lawyer, but I guess is not very fair that Meta is showcasing so much of the content of its own social VR application when there are other social VR applications on its store (e.g. VRChat) that are not getting the same treatment. The recent Digital Markets Act in the EU puts more pressure on the so-called “gatekeepers” to not favor their own products in the search results of their platforms. So, if I were Meta, I would be careful and evaluate what I am doing also on a legal standpoint before some antitrust entity wakes up and notices these potential issues.

A possible solution

I would re-design the whole experience on the mobile Meta Horizon app, making it more usable and giving more visibility to content on the store. And I would do the same on all platforms, from the web store to the runtime of Quest. I would also remove all the “Horizon Worlds” results from the search engine of the Store: if someone wants to look for a Horizon Worlds world, he had better open the Horizon Worlds app. Otherwise, it is like if I opened the Start menu of my Windows PC, and when I start typing “Wo” instead of finding “Microsoft Word”, the first suggestion would be the “Wololo Potato” world in Roblox. Wouldn’t this feel strange?

If Meta wants still to drag more people into social VR, it could create in its interface a little “Featured Worlds” section, where it hand-picks 4-5 spotlight experiences across all social VR worlds (Horizon Worlds, Rec Room, VRChat, …) that are absolutely worth a look. This could have value for both the users (who can so discover majestic social VR experiences) and developers of social VR content (because they have the opportunity to be spotlighted), but wouldn’t hurt the visibility of Quest apps on the main Store of the headset.

Furthermore, I think that Meta should also realize that probably Horizon Worlds is not what the VR community is looking for at this moment. If you need to always brute-force your product in front of the eyes of the people to gain new users, then it means that the product does not fit with the needs of the people. Consider also that notwithstanding all this visibility, Horizon Worlds is not even the most popular social VR world on the market: this says a lot. Google Chrome has been installed on every Android phone and it immediately became the to-go browser for everyone paired with Google Search because both products were crazy good before the recent enshittification. If this is not happening with Horizon Worlds, I think Meta should question itself if it is really on the right path with this product.

The Store Cut

The problem

Meta has still a 30% cut on all the transactions happening in the Store. 30% is really a lot of money, especially for small teams that are trying to make their business sustainable.

A possible solution

I know that managing a store is complicated and expensive. And I also know that Meta is subsidizing its cheap hardware with the money it earns from its store. So I’m not asking Meta to remove the Store fee, because that would make no sense.

But I still think there are ways to find a middle ground with the needs of the developers. For instance, the store fee may be reduced for the first period of “start up” of the various products or companies. Or it could be reduced for the products with sales below a certain threshold.

At this point, you may wonder why Meta should care about supporting small developers when it can afford to have big titles like Asgard’s Wrath 2 or Batman: Arkham Shadow that are self-funded. The reason is that the big titles are important, but it is the vibrant indie ecosystem that is keeping the platform alive, with its passion, innovation, and new ideas. I repeat it every time: many VR big hits have been developed by small indie studios. Two huge examples of this are Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag. At this moment, Meta can have a successful platform only as long as its developers are happy with it. And “happy” means that after they invested a lot of time and money to develop a piece of content, they can find enough people on the Meta Horizon Store that play their content and pay for it, making their business sustainable. Also because if we pay 30% of cut to the Store, the Store should give us a good service in return. If this doesn’t happen, all the developers will leave the platform, leaving Quest with a poor ecosystem and very bad press.

You may then wonder where could we go, considering that there is no platform as big as Quest now. Well, first of all, “now” is the key word here. Wait a few years and the Apple and Google stores would have become more relevant in XR, and if they offered better opportunities to devs, all people could jump ships. Then, remember that there are many ways to make money in XR, and enterprise XR is one of them: we are not forced to make consumer content. Or we could also simply do other jobs, like doing standard 3D content (which has an even bigger audience) or jump on the AI bandwagon. Actually, many friends have already left VR and are suggesting me to do the same and look for money elsewhere. We developers have many options, if we stay in VR is just for our passion.

Don’t misunderstand the tone of this article, though: I’m grateful for what Meta is doing for XR, for having released the Quest headset, and for having so created a VR ecosystem that is big enough that is sustainable for some developers. But I think that if we want to make XR succeed, we need to do this all together, and we should all support each other for this to happen. And this includes Meta in doing its part in helping us in doing our job. Even if this means making some present sacrifices like not putting its own product under the spotlight, because this can bring many long-term advantages for us and also for Meta itself. I really hope this can happen.

(Header image by Meta)

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