Dec 3, 2019

Updates to the Oculus Leaderboards Feature: Destinations, Social Stories, Notifications

We’ve heard from our developers and users that there is more we can do to surface leaderboards on our platform, and showcase the latest scores, bringing users back to their favorite app communities.

That’s all changing with a slew of updates we announced at Oculus Connect 6 to make leaderboards more engaging and more prominently featured at the platform level.

New features for Oculus Leaderboards

We’re introducing a number of ways for users to learn about changes to leaderboards from their favorite app communities, both in and out of VR, including:

A new Leaderboards destination within our Oculus platform interfaces.

Social stories, for high scores achieved by friends, which are featured in the VR and Mobile app feed.

Notifications when your friend passes your leaderboard score, shared on the Oculus Mobile App, Desktop app and in VR for Oculus Quest and Rift.

We’ve already tested these features with a number of apps and heard very positive feedback on the increased visibility of the apps across our platform, and the ways that these features are driving users back to the app to compete with their friends.

How do I enable these features?

Enabling these features requires very little effort, simply follow the steps below:

Go to Developer Center > Manage > Your App > Platform Services > Leaderboards

For each Leaderboard that you’d like to make user-facing in our system interfaces and notifications:

Click the ‘…’ button on the right hand side of each leaderboard you’ve created

Add a Title (the user facing name for this leaderboard).

Enable Leaderboard is user facing and Send Friend surpassed notifications.

Click Submit.

You can also provide translations to maximize the efficacy of this feature by surfacing these leaderboards in the right language for each user cohort.

For more information about the feature, you can also review the leaderboards documentation for Unity, Unreal and native development.

What’s next?

Over the next few months we’ll continue to extend leaderboard functionality, integrating it with our Destinations framework. Destinations allow you to define deep linkable locations in your app (like the level where you compete on a specific leaderboard). These deep links can be shared by users, and developers, via social media, messaging apps and web forums, with the ability to remotely launch your app directly to the right place to challenge a leaderboard.

Be sure to check out Mike Howard’s OC6 talk below or this social blog post for more about the latest social features that will help you drive a more connected, socially engaged audience with your game/application.