The epic journey of The Unity Cube
Some weeks ago, I’ve launched on App Lab “The Unity Cube”, a VR experience for Quest, with just… a cube and nothing more. I want to tell you the incredible story of this crazy launch, and how things have gone until now. It will be the occasion to tell you a happy story, to have some good laughs (you can’t miss the comments of the community that I’m copying at the end of this post!), but also to talk seriously about VR and content creation… so, let’s go!
The genesis of The Unity Cube
The Unity Cube has been developed as a tutorial application to teach you of the VR communities how to create an Oculus Quest application and distribute it on App Lab. Its development has happened live in a Youtube video in which I created it and submitted it on App Lab all while recording myself.
It is maybe a unique case of a VR app that has been entirely developed in a Youtube video and then distributed to the world!
The reasons for the cube
But “Why submitting just a cube?”, you may wonder. Isn’t it a stupid idea?
Well, yes, and no. Yes, because of course it’s an overly stupid application, and I know it myself. You can clearly see the moment in the video in which I submit it to App Lab and I say something like “Ok, I guess I have just trolled Facebook…”. It is an application that has no sense of existing in a store.
On the other side, no, because it is an extreme case, and as is, it was good for testing the capabilities of App Lab, especially, to evaluate their content curation process, that is the feature that sparked so many debates about the official Oculus Store. And besides that, it was fun. I mean, I had the opportunity to troll Facebook, and I caught it. Why shouldn’t I?
To explain to you the reasons about me developing and submitting just the cube, I’ll quote myself from the press release I sent to VR journalists (yes, I wrote an official statement about an app that is just a cube!):
The first [reason was] purely didactic: learn how the new App Lab platform works, in order to get to know the tool well and be able to inform the community about what difficulties the developers may encounter during the submission of their own application and make the work easier for them. To do that, I had to submit an application, and so I thought about something I could create fast… and a cube is very easy to develop. I have to say that this app was super-useful in this sense […]
Tony “Skarredghost”, that is myself, and I feel pretty weird auto-quoting me. But I also feel a bit more important
The second was to evaluate and promote the freedom for developers on the App Lab platform. Oculus has notoriously kept a strong curation on the Oculus Store, and while on one side this has brought many advantages for Quest users, on the other it has left many developers and many interesting ideas out of the Store gates. With App Lab there was the promise of greater freedom, and I wanted to evaluate how open it actually was. And what better way than a cube, the prime symbol of all applications on Unity, the first geometric shape we all created on this game engine? If a simple cube can be approved on the App Lab, then all applications can be approved, all ideas are valid, as long as they respect some basic rules (e.g. pornographic content is not allowed). And since the cube has been published, it means that App Lab is very open, and this is great news … we are happy that Facebook has made this choice.
Of course, I made it also for fun! I think we should smile more in the XR ecosystems, so I thought it could be funny to try to submit a cube and see what could happen. It sounded a bit like trolling Facebook and all the seriousness about the app submissions. And it was great seeing people asking me on Twitter and Linkedin how my submission was going, because they said they couldn’t wait to play with the cube! Sometimes we are too serious in our XR work, and have a bit of laugh between each other is very healthy. The cube was great for that.
I had my valid reasons to submit just a cube. It was the best way to do something crazy, provoking, and also funny that could make me test how App Lab is.
The Cube was submitted without putting too much care into it: I have even used the Dev account of my old full-body VR startup (Immotionar) to submit it. It was just a simple and stupid test. Something that most probably Facebook could reject, and in any case around which there could be no interest (it was a nonsense experience). So I submitted, and I waited for the review, not knowing how wrong I actually was.
The pre-approval process
While I was waiting for the approval, some other developers contacted me over Twitter or Linkedin to ask me about how the submission for the cube was going. Many people had seen my tutorial on App Lab, and they were waiting for their submission to be approved, and they wondered how mine was going. It was interesting that The Unity Cube was being used as a benchmark for App Lab approval times: it surprised me that so many people were still thinking about it.
Actually, after 6 weeks, the cube was rejected. I thought because it was just a cube, but in the end, it was only because of some problems with the audio permissions, an issue that haunts all Unity developers using Oculus SDK (someone should do something about it!). I fixed the issue, published a new tutorial about how I solved the problem (I fixed everything in a video, again), and submitted it.
In the end, after just a few days, with much of my surprise, The Unity Cube was approved. I was pleasantly surprised, but I was super-busy those days (I was working on the SXSW VR), so I waited some days before actually announcing it to the world.
What happened in those days of delays is actually interesting. I mean, nothing happened. And this is what is the sad thing about App Lab: it is like putting an unlisted video on Youtube. You exist, but no one knows it. Basically, Facebook gives you a platform where to publish your content, and this is for sure very good, but at the same time it gives you absolutely no tool to make you discoverable. Either you manage to draw people to the link of your application through marketing, or no one will see your content. Not even by chance.
Consider that being noticed is one of the biggest problems for indie developers, even on open platforms like Steam… and on App Lab the situation is very complicated for all indies, that not only have to find whatever trick to get noticed, with initiatives like Lab Surprise but they have also to fight against the titles on the Oculus Store that are already easily discoverable and can be installed with just a click. It feels like fighting an uneven match against privileged competitors. I hope that Facebook will work in improving this situation as well, giving more room to the titles that are outside the store… otherwise getting noticed becomes very complex.
That said, the big day arrived, and I announced the launch of The Unity Cube to the world.
The successful launch
The Unity Cube was launched on April, 6th 2021 with this semi-serious post. It even came with a nonsense trailer that for sure you all will love.
I shared the news with some friends, community members, and even some journalists in the field that I know well. The first reactions were mostly jokes… then the unthinkable happened.
Benjamin Lang, my “review hero” at Road To VR, dedicated a full article to the cube. It was defined “The Worse Quest Game”, and Ben was interested in talking about it exactly because it was a great testbench for the curation process that Facebook was keeping for App Lab. It was fantastic being featured on Road To VR, which is one of the most famous magazines, one that I read every week. Speaking with my partner Massimiliano Ariani, we decided it could be a great idea to send the news also to other journalists.
Thanks to this outreach effort, Charlie Fink mentioned it in one of his famous “This Week in XR” roundups on Forbes. Tom FFiske has talked about it in his amazing weekly newsletter. And Jamie Feltham and Zeena Al-Obaidi played the game in their VR Roulette on Upload VR!
The news went almost everywhere in the VR communities. I’ve found it on Real O Virtual, a Spanish publication about XR. The cube was mentioned in the FReality Podcast that features Nathie and Mike VRO, two of the biggest VR Youtubers.
I’ve even watched a video from a Japanese person that reviews it in Japanese and it is overly cute when he/she says “You can do nothing here, you can really do nothing here”. A Japanese anime girl that tries a VR app with just a cube and keeps saying that you can’t do anything in it is the tipping point that VR has ever reached.
I know for sure that the app has been shared also inside Unity employees’ internal chats. Someone from Unity even shared the news over Linkedin!
All this visibility led to many reviews on App Lab and SideQuest, with a total review score between 4 and 4.5 on both platforms!
The cube was everywhere, and people from all over the world (US, China, Italy, Australia, …) were asking me about it! It was insane… I just published it without even thinking much about it, and in the end, its launch has been a blast!
Some thoughts on the Cube’s success
It was incredible. In 6-7 years of career in the VR field, I have developed some technically advanced things, like the full-body VR system that we made at Immotionar with an array of Kinects in 2014; or the fitness game HitMotion: Reloaded, one of the first games in mixed reality on a VR headset (Oculus will launch the passthrough SDK this year, we made a passthrough game in 2019); and in the end… I get featured on the two most popular VR magazines, Upload VR and Road To VR with… A CUBE. I have understood nothing about life.
What’s interesting about this, the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is that you never know what is going to work. That’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way both as an entrepreneur and a blogger: sometimes you make great things and you get no visibility (I mean… we had FULL BODY VR IN 2015 and no one knew about it!) and other times you make a very silly thing, and it becomes viral. That’s why the best suggestion for a startupper is to put his/her product on the market the soonest possible: because the only real judge is the actual market. You can make predictions, you can analyze data and forecasts, you can develop things the best that you can… but the only and unique way to see if something works is to show it to people and see how they react.
Think about some of the most popular games we had these years. For instance, Beat Saber is a very simple game, and I could prototype its main mechanics in maybe 3 days of work. Among Us is a basic indie game, with very basic graphics. But they have been conceived and developed very well, and the community loved sharing videos about them, so they became viral, and they earned more money than some AAA titles. Life feels like a roulette sometimes.
That’s why I invite you to keep pusing: just do many things… put a lot of effort in everything, and diversify what you do. Sooner or later, maybe with the most unexpected thing, you will succeed... however you interpret the word “success”. I had this little dream of being featured on both Road To VR and Upload VR, and I obtained it with a cube… but it came after years in which I created many things in the VR ecosystem (blog articles, utilities, applications, etc…) and I got to know many people. Keep working and one day success will arrive.
I understood that we see things only from our point of view, but actually, there are many others we usually don’t consider. Something that may not be important for us, may be very interesting for other people, or may even be irritating for others. For instance, some people got angry about the cube because they told me that with this stupid application, I slowed the publication path of all the other indie devs that had applied to App Lab. Instead, as soon as I talked about The Cube to Max, my partner at New Technology Walkers, he immediately got his artistic power. Max comes from an artistic background, and he sees this as a provoking piece of art, something with very strong power. Art is creating something new and disruptive, and a cube in a store where everyone is rushing to create the best content fits absolutely in this sense.
And it’s funny that it is a cube because I met Max, with which I started NTW, in a game jam where he was developing a game that was all about cubes. It looks like the end of a circle to me. Or the end of a cube.
Utility for the community
The Unity Cube has made me learn how App Lab works, and while developing and submitting it, I’ve learned a lot. Thanks to its lessons, not only I have written three informative posts about App Lab on my blog The Ghost Howls, but I’ve also collaborated with XR Bootcamp and SideQuest on a guide about App Lab that has been released for free to the community. The Cube has helped the VR developers for the good, making me learn many things I have been able to teach to others.
Some statistics
Let me give you some statistics about the Unity Cube. The Cube has been approved on App Lab, SideQuest, and App Lab DB. Someone from Reddit found the approval weird because he said that both App Lab and SideQuest have refused in the past more complex applications because they were below minimum quality standards. I have no proof of this claim, but if it is true, it means that either people love Cubes at Facebook, or the approval process has changed after the first days of App Lab, and it has become less strict (or maybe automated, as someone suggested).
I have to say that Facebook offers a fantastic dashboard for content creators in which it is possible to gather a lot of data about your application. I have to really compliment Facebook in this, it is clearly visible that they are data experts (cough cough)
The first datum that is overly important is that the app has had until today 1300+ installations and 1100+ users. My dream goal was to arrive at 1000 users, and I still remember when I told this to an online blogger and he laughed very hard. Well, 23 days later, I am already beyond that, so I am the one to laugh (ha ha). The Quest has so many users, that even a cube can go beyond the 1000 users mark!
The adoption graph is the typical one of all VR games: a big spike at the beginning for the launch, thanks also to all the publications, a second spike one week ago thanks to Upload VR video, and for the rest a decreasing trend. Usually at this stage, for a standard game, I had to increase my marketing, or organize some bundles, some updates, to make the product spike again. But I think it’s quite difficult to do it… for a cube!
I had 68 ratings over 1365 downloads, for a ratio of 1 review/user rate every 20 downloads or 1 review every 17 users. I think that the application is so crazy that many people want to leave a review, so I think it has a higher ratio if compared with the other “normal” applications. But these are numbers that you can consider using when trying to extrapolate the actual downloads of an app from the review numbers… I think the ratio may be from 15x to 30x when trying to calculate the downloads from the user ratings on the Oculus Store, depending on what is the appeal of reviewing that application (coolest one are around 15x, less interesting ones around 30x). Yes, journalists and analysts, I’m talking to you, you can use this data for your calculations. And I hope that many other developers would share their numbers so that it can be easier to make estimates of apps downloads even on a store where very few share their numbers.
What surprises me even more about these statistics is the framerate, that is less than 71FPS. How the hell is possible that a single cube doesn’t run at 72FPS on all Quest devices?? John Carmack, I need you to answer this…
There are also many other graphics about user engagement and retention. In this first one I’m sharing with you, it is possible to see that there are some crazy people that return to play the cube after the first day.
And you can also see that the percentages of people that return after the first day would make Pareto happy (it’s 80-20% like Pareto’s Law say)
Regarding the retention, this is the graph… you can see that some people remain engaged with the cube, and this is a great piece of news!
Future perspectives
So, what are the future perspectives on The Unity Cube? Well, first of all, I’ll try contacting Oculus to see if they can publish it on the official store. I mean, it’s a work of art, it’s a unique app, it has been featured in the most important magazines, it deserves to be there. And it would be interesting to see their answer. Quoting me again on this:
Now the question could move to the main store: Facebook has stated that it will try to follow its users’ feedback to decide what to publish on the main store. So… what would happen if this cube managed to have 100,000 downloads? Would it be published on the official Store, because it would be a successful application, or not, given its low quality? Probably not, but the doubt comes to mind. Surely with the cube there was the desire to take the situation to an extreme and see what could happen.
Myself
Apart from that, Massimiliano and his partner at Infinite Officine in Milan are studying the artistic power of the Cube and are working on something cool about it. They even created some fun artworks around the Cube, like this one about a famous American person…
We are working on its artistic possibilities, and we hope to tell you something about them soon, hoping you can join us in this cubic journey 🙂
The community has also asked to me some features in a semi-serious way:
- The “Sphere DLC” was one of the most requested features, especially from people that dislike figures full of vertices
- Paid skins for the cube, to customize it however you want
- Multiplayer functionalities, so that you can enjoy the cube together with your friends
- Full body haptic support, so that you can feel the cube on your skin
- Easter eggs of various kinds, like that you make two backflips and in the end, the cube becomes black to show you how useless life is
These are all fantastic features… I am unsure if implementing them or leaving the cube as is because its perfection is being just a cube. Let me know in the comments what are your thoughts about it!
The fun of comments
Some of the comments to the Cube app on the stores or on social media have been incredibly funny. Here below I’m showing you some of the best ones… prepare yourself for a good laugh!
Don’t forget to download The Unity Cube, give it 5 stars and write a funny comment you too!
…and one last important thing
I made a promise when I published The Unity Cube: if it reached the unthinkable goal of 1000 downloads, I would have done a donation to a charity to celebrate.
I’m a man of his own word, so I just made a personal donation to AIRC (Italian Association for Research on Cancer), because… fuck cancer.
I hope the Cube will give its little contribution in making fewer people suffer from this terrible disease. I see this as a way to transfer my happiness for the success of the cube, to give future happiness to people that will be able to stay healthy again.
Save the cube, save the world. And I hope you will have a happy day as well 🙂
Disclaimer: this blog contains advertisement and affiliate links to sustain itself. If you click on an affiliate link, I'll be very happy because I'll earn a small commission on your purchase. You can find my boring full disclosure here.
