Indie developer shares the lessons learned from publishing the first App Lab bundle

Hello Julien, can you introduce yourself to my readers?

Hi! I’m often presented as a creative technologist, meaning that I’m at the crossing of creativity and technology. I also have a marketing background from working with several well-known agencies. On Peco Peco my role can span from prototyping interactions and content (but it’s Benjamin, our lead designer, who makes them really great and Jonathan, our lead dev, who created the core engine of Peco Peco 😃), product development (we work on the vision together) and marketing (not the favorite part of my partners 😂 so I gladly take the biggest share of it)

What was the “Waiting For App Lab” bundle?

The “Waiting For App Lab” Bundle” was a 1-week, 80% off the usual price bundle of 12 indie VR games that had already submitted their games to be in App Lab, the new unlisted release channel for Oculus Quest.

You can find the full list of games on the (archived) page for the bundle https://itch.io/b/794/waiting-for-app-lab-vr-bundle and a trailer with all the games here below

As players, I think we all love bundles, they are a fun way to spotlight different sorts of games, to mix them.

How was the idea born?

I saw that everybody was waiting for the App Lab approvals to come through: the developers, of course, but also the journalists and the players! It was like App Lab had put all the VR Quests devs in suspension… freezing them.

So my idea was to not be frozen by the wait, to help the indie developers make the best out of the waiting period before they are accepted in App Lab, including our own team.

The vast majority of VR devs are very isolated right now, there are no events, and as the ecosystem is still a majority of indie and solo developers, they are also quite isolated in terms of marketing and communication. 

Our feeling is that we would all benefit from more collective marketing, instead of struggling with solo marketing that, frankly, doesn’t work that well.

Can you give us some statistics on the sales?

We had zero expectations when starting, we just wanted to turn a nerve-wracking situation into an empowering situation for us and for our players.

In 6 days we sold more than 800 copies of the bundle, it might seem a small number compared to the top games featured in the Oculus Store, but for indie developers with sideloaded Quest games not even on App Lab yet, 800 new players is great.

From our account, it was more sales than the 2 or 3 paid App Lab games that were accepted during this period, all combined, so in a way, we proved that App Lab alone is not the miracle cure: we need to team up more as VR devs, not only on the tech side but on the marketing side.

That’s also a total gross revenue of a bit over $15,000. We decided from early on to split that equally, even if the prices for our games were not equal at all, because we felt it was a great way to start the bundle as partners.

Of course, you have to subtract the fees from Itch, Paypal, Stripe, and then maybe Payoneer, so in the end, each game might have had a net payout of a bit over $1000 dollars from these 6 days of sales (calculating the payout from the gross revenues is not really straightforward as it depends on the various fees at each step).

Actually, on Twitter we had a VR developer doubting our bundle, saying it was devaluing our games, and that it would be an incredible event if we had even $150 each out of this. On the day of this tweet, we had already crossed over $200 of revenue for each game 😃

But I get the sentiment, games are hard, long work, and it can be unsustainable to price them too low. In this case, the exposure we got from our surprise bundle made up for the huge discount we wanted to offer our players.

Has it been difficult to partner with other game studios for this project?

It was surprisingly easy! 

I’m a strong believer in open calls. That’s how we launched Museomix, a now 10-year old international creative event in museums, by calling out for anyone who wanted to remix a museum, right there.

So I applied the same strategy to the bundle, I openly called for all VR developers who had submitted to App Lab to set up a bundle on Monday, laid down a few points… and 3 devs immediately said yes. We had help from several people who amplified our call, like Shane from SideQuest.

A few hours later, we reached 12 games and decided to launch on Tuesday, the next day 😃, up until Sunday. 

What has worked and what has not in this business idea? What errors have you made and what lessons have you learned?

All in all, we didn’t have a lot of expectations launching it so it worked as well as it could. But you are right that it was an accelerated learning experience on how to best create and market a bundle.

For example, we launched without a trailer, and with a very basic cover for the bundle, just 12 thumbnails all together. Then the group came together, and one of us quickly edited a draft trailer. Then another one made it into a more polished trailer. And we also used collaborative tools like Figma to produce covers, ads, as the launch

We also tested live, during the bundle, what kind of ads might work. I think the learning there is that if you test, you will be surprised at what works and what doesn’t. 

One thing that couldn’t work was adding more developers along with the bundle. It was an interesting idea, and we had a few proposals from developers, but it was not possible using the Itch bundle system, and even if it was possible, it could have been confusing for a 6-day bundle like this one. But the idea of an open bundle is fun, and maybe we could find a way to make it work next time.

One great advantage in doing marketing as a team, as a collective instead of alone, is that we can pull together our learnings, our data, our previous experiments. We are much less in the dark with 12 ideas of what works and what doesn’t.

We also learned that many developers we know from the forums and Discord servers are still a bit in the dark regarding marketing and the press. We had developers being confused by the bundle or being a bit bewildered by the fact that journalists were happy to talk about it, and part of that was that the marketing resources for VR developers are very vague, mostly focused on the creation of assets.

But marketing has to be creative too, not just on the content side, but in the way you do it. That’s why we want to open our group to more developers, to create interesting and creative ways to reach out to players.

Marketing is one of the biggest pain points for indie teams. How have you managed to get such great exposure for this product?

We would have loved to have more exposure, to be totally transparent! But that’s partly our fault, as we decided to launch the bundle on a whim, and we didn’t give any time to the press, bloggers, or YouTube creators to learn about it 😅

We did things a bit backward: we launched, and then told the press… but everybody was super reactive, and they got the idea of the collective marketing effort.

We reached out to people we like, the ones whom we read their articles or watch their videos, the ones we interact with, and we just told them how and why we did it by sharing a clean, simple document: What is it? Why are we doing it? What are the games in it?

There’s a real lack of proper bundles for Quest games, so I think having this offer, the first-ever App Lab dedicated bundle, was interesting for a lot of people, and made people want to talk about it.

Oculus always celebrates the big names on the Oculus Store. What’s your view on the situation of indie game studios that earn much less also because they can’t be published on the Oculus Store?

Creative projects including games or apps are always in a very diverse market, with a few hits and long tails of smaller and smaller successes. 

We all understand why Oculus celebrates the hits: it shows that the ecosystem is growing, it shows that you can build up a studio based on VR titles. Of course, Oculus must also demonstrate that the market can do more than sustain 10 or 20 hits, but that it can also help a healthy long tail of smaller studios to emerge and grow.

The VR ecosystem, including Quest, is still mostly solo developers. I think the vast majority of games I played lately comes from solo developers. What is Oculus planning to help these solo developers or very small teams more easily reach success, to prove themselves? 

Now that the Quest pitch process is gone, Oculus must find a way to help the vast majority of developers market their apps and games, with as many marketing tools as possible. Artificial scarcity like on the Store can’t be the only path to success for VR developers.

Have you all managed to get back the money that you spent to develop your games or not?

As far as the Peco Peco team is concerned, we are not there yet! We have spent a large amount of time in the last 2 years exploring what we could build in VR, there was obviously a lot of personal learning and false directions, but even if you just count the time spent on Peco Peco since last June 2020 (part-time for all 3 of us), we didn’t get the equivalent back. 

It’s the same for the small team of two behind Sep’s Diner. They started with a location-based entertainment business model, and now they are expanding into direct sales to players.

But some of us have been selling their game for a long time, and by being very careful in terms of spending and by diversifying the platforms and market they are in, like the Jigsaw 360 developer, for example, they managed to cover their development cost.

All in all, building a game takes time, reaching out to players from zero takes time, and you either have big initial funding or you just find a way to keep your life balanced while spending the time necessary to grow your project. I come from a contemporary art and digital art background, and in these art professions, it’s very similar to indie game development: projects are often built up from zero, fully paid by the artists… and then some art center will come and exhibit them… 

When you build up a project like a VR game or any creative project for that matter, the goal might not be to recoup all the time you spent, but probably more to make it sustainable, to be able to focus more and more of your time on it. That’s the focus we have right now: grow revenues so our games are sustainable and can grow with the player base.

Do you think that App Lab is going to change something for indies, or more or less, things will be the same on the business side?

Well, it certainly is a nice technical change, and for example, it has immediately made updating the version our beta testers play much easier! Having access to the Quest users directly, without the obstacle of sideloading, is also very promising. I think all App Lab developers are asking for is to have a fair way to prove that their app is worthwhile to players.

But at the moment being on App Lab still feels that it will be like swimming against the stream: there are the delays, of course, it has been several weeks now since the original launch and just a few apps that we know of have been approved… Some days no app at all seems to have been approved. But it’s hard to tell as Oculus has a policy of not sharing any numbers.

But more than the delays, App Lab comes with a lot of limitations on our ability to market our apps. Many of the features that make it easier for developers to reach and please players are not accessible to App Lab apps: there’s no cross-buy with Rift games, no access to sales/discounts, no way to sell bundles natively, no affiliation system that we could use to reward partners. IAP and DLC are still not open to App Lab developers (but it’s coming soon, hopefully).

Even if a player searches for an App Lab app word-for-word in the store search, its icon is hidden behind a black square, and the user has to do at least 3 clicks before installing it… Most of the time, official Store apps are put above the App Lab app, even for an exact search. And the hardest thing: we cannot even change the price of our app ourselves. It’s a manual process involving asking support to do it.

I think App Lab developers are happy to do their own marketing, but if we are going to do it all by ourselves and share 30% of our sales, we need Oculus to give us the basic tools to market effectively.

What do you think is the most difficult thing when developing a VR game? Tell us something from your experience!

As a designer, I find the state of basic VR interaction primitive to be really, really bad. Most VR developers reimplement the most basic interactions. Imagine having to re-implement drag and drop for each Mac app? That’s basically what VR devs do today… and of course, they all do it slightly differently, leading to 3 or 4 different ways of activating a teleport on Quest apps using controllers. The most commonly used reason is that “it’s early” but it has been early for several years now…

And on the other hand, the third-party interaction toolkits like VRIF, VRTK, or MRTK bring a lot of unneeded code and are too opinionated (they offer much too much, paradoxically). You’d think these toolkits will get you what you want faster, but it comes at its own cost.

The result is that VR developers generally reinvent the wheel and take shortcuts like hardcoded handedness, or pick random toolkits with their own baked assumptions… instead of having great designers giving them great base interactions to just use as Apple did with Macintosh in 1984 and iPhone in 2008.

The unwillingness of all the VR platform stake-holders to have and to impose a strong opinion on what is good VR interaction is setting the bar so low… Is that because they’re from the game industry and not the more traditional UX design industry? Do they think standardizing UX is limiting creativity? Most developers are not going to re-invent a great UX from scratch, or even if they want to do that, they will just copy something. Give them out-of-the-box great base interaction behaviors.

All in all the idea that “developers need to explore and UX will improve over time” is not really reflected in the apps we see today. Sometimes I just want Apple to get their headset out, with one-right-way to do things, and save us all from bad VR UX once and for all 😅

What are your future plans?

We will create new events and new bundles for the Quest players. As more games and apps are approved on App Lab, the need for collective marketing will be bigger than ever. 

For marketing, we should draw inspiration from outside of VR, and I would say even outside of traditional gaming. VR is a medium where the body is engaged, and maybe there are crazy ideas from fashion, sports, traditional events, the art market to bring in to make players interested in knowing more about our apps. For example, we’d love to create new ideas with YouTube creators, most VR devs and YouTube creators are indies, and we should invent more fun ideas together, where the developers create something special for the YouTube creator, and there’s a collab, not just a review.

We have already set up a Discord server (the server is just called “Collective Marketing” so everyone gets the idea behind it 😉) to host the planning and organization of our new marketing events, and we plan to invite more App Lab developers to participate in the coming days.

A final curiosity: Have in the end some apps of the bundle been accepted into App Lab?

Yes,  that’s the good news, as of March 9th The Final Overs, Jigsaw 360, and our own game Peco Peco have been approved and can be bought and installed directly from App Lab. All the existing players will receive free Oculus Keys to benefit from the automated updates, direct access from the home with a nice icon, and more features allowed by the integration with the Oculus environment.

From what we see, all 12 games will be approved in March, maybe sooner than expected.

Anything else to add to this interview?

If Quest VR developers, especially developers who have already submitted a paid app to App Lab, have questions about marketing their unlisted app, how to reach out to journalists nicely and appropriately, they can reach me easily on Twitter, my DMs are open: https://twitter.com/juliendorra

I’ll be happy to share what we know, help them with advice.