The SideQuest VR application platform has received additional investments. The company will create tools to help developers port games to Oculus Quest.
Example of the SideQuest interface
Last year, SideQuest raised $650,000 with the participation of Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.
Investments went to the development of a testing service and other tools for VR developers. Now the company has raised another $3 million in seed investment.
SideQuest plans to spend money on porting VR applications to other platforms. To do this, the company will create tools and services based on the OpenXR standard.
The creators of the games Puzzling Places, Hyper Dash and Cubism have already given feedback on the work on SideQuest, the effectiveness of the site and the prospects for release on various platforms.
“The ecosystem has expanded a lot, more new devices have appeared, so we want to help developers port their applications to other platforms,” comments Orla Harris, co—founder of SideQuest.
SideQuest is an unofficial app store for Oculus Quest glasses. The advantage of the platform is that VR developers manually upload projects to the headset without moderation and prior approval from Oculus.
The possibility of sideload-loading from SideQuest creates additional tension between the platform and Facebook. The latter can disable the function at any time.
However, Facebook has not yet done so. Instead, at the beginning of 2021, the company launched its own platform for the “unofficial” distribution of VR applications – App Lab. On it, you can skip the certification from Oculus, unlike the main “Facebook” platform Oculus Store.
Perhaps, over time, SideQuest and Facebook will come to an agreement, and the unofficial platform will become a bridge between indie VR developers and Oculus.