Google’s GV backs SideQuest, an unofficial Meta Quest app store

techcrunch.com:

While the broader virtual reality industry earnestly waits for Meta’s next announcements around new VR products at its Connect event next week, Google’s venture arm GV is placing an interesting bet in a startup building up an ecosystem around some of Meta’s hardware.

GV has led a $12 million Series A investment in SideQuest, the makers of an alternative app store for the Meta Quest VR headset, which allows developers to ship and market experimental games that may not initially meet Meta’s stringent store approval processes.

Since launching their app in early 2019 after the Oculus Quest first launched, SideQuest’s married founders Shane and Orla Harris have been streamlining the app’s user experience while building out a more mature jumping off point for VR game developers to reach communities of early users and get feedback before graduating to the official store. A handful of titles have already made that leap from SideQuest’s experimental arms, including VR basketball app Gym Class which banked funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator earlier this year.

YC and a16z back virtual reality basketball app Gym Class

SideQuest’s founders have long been looking for ways to support VR game development. An early investment from Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey gave the couple runway to explore how they could turn their experiment into a company. While the Harrises have plenty of kind words to say about Meta’s VR investment, they are worried by the lack of platform diversity in the virtual reality industry, and hope that more open source projects like theirs can help.

“As much as we’re all pretty thankful for the investment that Facebook has made, we still want choice,” SideQuest co-founder Shane Harris tells TechCrunch.

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