If you have a favorite title on the Oculus Go that was never released for the updated Quest, worry no more. Later this year all Oculus Go apps and games will be available to buy and download on the Oculus Quest.
John Carmack, CTO of Oculus, confirmed that at the Quest is going to be supporting all Go apps and games in this calendar year. This is sure to bring hundreds of new games and experiences to the Quest. This will only boost the content sales on the standalone headset from Facebook. Carmack stated that “by way of a compatibility layer that makes Quest report as a Go and emulate the Go controller for old apps.” This is going to be pretty cool to see this powerful headset be dumbed down a bit for simpler games, and adding 6DOF to a handful of these games are going to help them tremendously.
“Not everything works, but many old apps do magically get 6DOF headset and controller tracking, as well as higher resolution and frame rate, so it is fun to dig through some old favorites,” Carmack said in the same statement. He is absolutely right that this is going to be a fun and new way to get our old favorite games on our new favorite headset. Carmack went on to say that “We will be working with developers to test against the emulator, but I hope some will be inspired enough to convert older apps to proper ‘hybrid’ Go / Quest apps with explicit support.”
From a developing standpoint, it won’t take much to make Carmack’s idea to take place. Making a game compatible for both is nearly as simple as making a game for the Quest and Rift. Although the headsets are completely different, the idea is all the same and we can expect that the games will translate well. We aren’t sure if the games will all be released at once or if they will take a more marketable approach to this idea yet, but we do know that developers will need to opt in for their games to be a part of the Oculus Store on the Oculus Quest.
This seems like a step in the wrong direction for Facebook, as Oculus has been very stubborn about the quality of apps they have been allowing on the Quest. They have been a handful of legal disputes over this, and it seems very odd Facebook is confident about this idea going forward. Back in February the company said “We’ve set a high bar for content quality on Quest, higher than we’ve ever enforced before, in order to build a platform where everyone has confidence in the quality of the titles they’re buying and developers know that their investments have a strong chance of success.”
If you get anything from that quote, it is that they are very confident that their content will be top-tier on their new headset. We know that there needs to be more content on the Quest, but porting all of the Go apps and and games onto the Quest seems like a questionable idea at best. Not only is this move sure to slow the Quest down at times, but we are certain that the quality of titles on the newest standalone headset will be taking a hit. If a company is concerned about the quality of content on a premier headset, the last place to look for quality content is in the Oculus Go store.
