1.12.2022

Squad Up: Build Responsible and Engaging Multiplayer Experiences in VR

For decades, multiplayer games have brought people together to compete, laugh, and play. From the earliest days of local multiplayer with Pong⁠ to modern matchmaking lobbies, multiplayer capabilities have evolved to help players stay engaged and build lasting connections. In VR, multiplayer experiences bring an added dimension of presence, which helps players feel like they’re physically together—no matter where they may be in the world.

We’re committed to empowering you with services and tools to build strong multiplayer communities that cultivate lasting connections for your users. Below, we dive into how you can use our multiplayer and integrity APIs to grow your app communities in a responsible way—and how they can positively impact retention, engagement, and growth.

Drive Engagement with Core Platform Features

Multiplayer experiences are a core pillar of our app ecosystem, but don’t take our word for it—roughly 62% of people on our platform have spent time in a multiplayer app over the past 30 days. This tells us that people are actively searching for experiences that enable them to explore, connect, and play with others. Our Platform SDK includes a variety of multiplayer services that can help you start building and engaging your community. These services can be divided into two fundamental building blocks: Destinations and Group Presence.

Destinations are social gathering places in your app that help people discover new content, jump into experiences directly, and coordinate with friends. They can help you drive engagement by being displayed to users on various pages in the Meta Quest Store, and they’re associated with a URL, so you can post to other channels like social media and improve visibility.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working to improve Destinations so you get the most bang for your proverbial buck. In December, we’ll implement updates that improve Destination reliability, add visibility for Destinations on the Meta Quest Store Explore page, and automate the approval process so you can ship Destinations almost instantaneously.

Group Presence facilitates social interaction by showing people what their friends are up to in VR. With this API, the platform is updated with a user’s current Destination and status, whether they are joinable, and lobby and match information. Group Presence helps drive engagement by encouraging users to organically discover experiences and activities with which their friends are engaged—and letting them join their friends with one click.

Create Sustainable Engagement with VR Travel

Together, Destinations and Group Presence enable what we call “VR Travel,” a process that allows people to join up together in the same immersive app experience. Our Platform SDK includes three APIs that let you expand how your users join together and travel between your Destinations.

Group Launch lets players start a party together before jumping into an app together.

App Invites allow your users to invite their friends to the app that they’re already in. This API supports sending invites through both the system menu and your in-app UI.

Invite Link creates URLs that users can share to join together with friends in a Destination, either from the Meta Quest mobile app or in VR.

Together, these APIs can drive both engagement and retention while providing a flexible social experience for your users. To show you how multiplayer services can positively impact your app and business, we worked with Ready At Dawn to create a case study that explores how their team integrated these features in Echo VR⁠—and how they improved a variety of key metrics.

Demos to Help You Integrate Multiplayer Services

Understanding how all of these APIs fit together may be challenging initially, but our SharedSpaces Multiplayer Showcase can help you visualize the potential use cases of these services. This showcase was specifically designed by our VR Developer Technology team to demonstrate how you can quickly get people together in VR. By exploring the showcase video and documentation in Developer Center and GitHub, you can build a foundation for building your own multiplayer experiences.

Since we released the SharedSpaces Multiplayer Showcase last year, we’ve been working on a new playable multiplayer demo, titled GL VR: Supercharged Dodgeball. This demo will expand on the resources you have at your disposal to help you understand how multiplayer services can be used—and how to integrate them. GL VR: Supercharged Dodgeball will be available later in December, but you can get a sneak peek during this developer session from Meta Connect 2022.

Preserve User Preferences with Blocking API

The APIs we’ve highlighted can empower you to create new and recurring social experiences for your users. But once people are together, it’s critically important to ensure their privacy, safety, and preferences are upheld. Everyone deserves to have an enjoyable experience in VR, but harassment and abuse from bad actors can disrupt user experience and potentially drive people away from your app.

Our Blocking API can help you reduce and prevent toxic social interactions in your app by empowering users to block bad actors they encounter in your app and upholding blocks that users made elsewhere on our platform. If someone has blocked another person on the platform for any reason, the Blocking API enables you to integrate and uphold those blocks to create a safer experience. You can start integrating Blocking API today by checking out our documentation.

Create a Safe User Experience with User Reporting

We’ve updated our Virtual Reality Check (VRC) Guidelines to require all multiplayer apps to have an in-app user reporting mechanism accessible through the

button. We consider any app with synchronous or asynchronous multiplayer environments a multiplayer app. The VRC Guidelines on reporting are currently recommended for all multiplayer apps, and they will become a requirement for all existing and new multiplayer apps on May 31, 2023. After this date, the existing Meta Quest Platform reporting flow will be phased out—and developers of multiplayer apps will be required to comply with the VRC Guidelines by adopting one of the following tools:

User Reporting Plugin: If your app has an existing user reporting mechanism, you can choose to use the User Reporting Plugin to connect it to the

button. This plugin doesn’t change how you receive and manage in-app user reports, and it’s available as part of Platform SDK. To get started with the User Reporting Plugin, check out our documentation.

User Reporting Service: Starting in Q1 2023, you’ll also be able to leverage the User Reporting Service, a new end-to-end in-app user reporting flow accessible from the

button. It will be an out-of-the-box solution that needs to be enabled in the Developer Dashboard⁠. Once you enable the User Reporting Service in the Developer Dashboard, users in your app will be able to submit reports via a menu accessible from the

button, and you’ll start receiving user reports for your app.

You can learn more about these updates here.

With real-time social interactions in VR, people can make unique and lasting connections—and build a strong sense of community, causing them to return to an experience again and again. Use these multiplayer features to unlock stronger connections in your app community and grow your audience.

Multi-User

Platform SDK

Quest

VRC

Did you find this page helpful?

Explore more