Mar 11, 2026

Faster Builds, Smarter Discovery, and the LiveOps Playbook: What to Know After GDC Day 2

Developers from all corners of the games industry gather at GDC to discover what's working, what's coming, and where to invest next. This year, by the end of day two, VR developers got all three.

Chris Pruett's State of VR session set the stage for Day 2. Across our sessions so far, we've focused on the practical side of building for Meta Horizon OS: faster iteration through better tooling, how discovery works on the Meta Horizon Store, and how to keep players engaged long after launch. Attendees also walked away with a candid LiveOps playbook featuring practical strategies for building lasting player engagement.

Whether you're already building for Meta Horizon OS or exploring it as a platform, here's what you need to know through day two. Jump to a section or keep reading for our key takeaways:

Tools to build faster

How AI is shaping development workflows

Optimizing presence in the Meta Horizon Store

The LiveOps playbook

Next steps

Start Building Faster With Better Out-of-the-Box Tools

Every developer wants to ship faster. Mike Lamprinos (Product Manager, Meta), Kirk Barker (Product Manager, Meta), and Alexandre Thivierge (Software Engineer, Meta) showed them how in their nuts and bolts session focused on developer tools.

Walking through exactly what's evolving (and accelerating) in day-to-day VR development, they broke down several core tools with one goal in mind: get developers to a working build faster.

Setup

To keep things running smoothly as you build, the Project Setup Tool can help you catch configuration issues before they turn into time-sinks. It scans your project and helps you configure it for Meta Horizon OS.

Use the Project Setup Tool in Unity to quickly configure your project for Meta Horizon OS development.

You can even add your own configuration tasks and immediately fix common issues, which is helpful whether you're brand new to VR development or want to hit the ground running. In fact, four of the five highest-revenue apps released since Connect '24 used it during development.

Integration

Next up: Building Blocks. Think of these as pre-built, drag-and-drop pieces for the stuff you'd otherwise rebuild every time, like hands, controllers, interactions, Passthrough, mixed reality, and even multiplayer.

At GDC, developers had the chance to get hands on with tools like Building Blocks at the Meta booth.

And with the latest updates, they're getting even more robust for new use cases. The new AI Building Blocks let you plug in your preferred LLM and pair it with the Meta Voice SDK, so adding natural conversation and voice control is a lot more straightforward. On top of that, we introduced Passthrough Camera Access Building Blocks, which make it easier to build apps that can understand (and respond to) what's happening around you.

Dilmer Valecillos (Developer Advocate, Meta) shows how to get started with AI Building Blocks.

So instead of spending hours setting up hand tracking or sorting out Passthrough permissions, you can drop in a Building Block and focus on what makes your app special.

Iteration

After showing how quickly you can get up and running with setup and implementation, the team shifted to iterating with the redesigned Meta XR Simulator. Updated for faster mixed reality and multiplayer testing, the tool enables you to test your apps across different room configurations, simulate hands and controllers, capture and replay sessions, and run multiplayer environments without ever wearing a headset.

Meta XR Simulator's synthetic environments let you test your experiences across several room configurations.

Last up: if you're using Unity 6+, Unity OpenXR is now the recommended path. The Meta OpenXR package reached feature and performance parity with the Meta XR Core SDK as of version 1.14.

AI Is Ready to Support Your Development Workflow

In parallel with changes taking place across nearly every industry, AI is also shaping the future of VR development. You probably know it can be used to assist with coding, but now it's moved beyond that to help you unify tools, documentation, and debugging into one streamlined workflow.

Meta Quest Developer Hub v6.2.1 (Windows | Mac) includes a built-in MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. Once connected, your AI assistant can pull Meta Horizon OS documentation, grab logcat output and screenshots, run performance checks, and search 3D assets with natural language.

Removing friction is at the core of our goals for tooling development. That's why we designed setup to only take a few clicks: open Meta Quest Developer Hub, go to Settings, select AI Tools, and connect your LLM.

Unity AI Gateway⁠ (in beta) brings this into the editor. We've added XR-specific actions so you can use natural language to add camera rigs, sync config files and manifests, and drop in interaction components like grab, distance grab, teleport hotspots, and poke/ray interactions.

Using an AI agent can help you make specific objects grabbable in just a few steps.

To put it simply, if you're already using an AI assistant for development, these integrations keep you in flow instead of jumping between tools.

How to Optimize Your Presence in the Meta Horizon Store

In the session "Discovery Decoded," Product Manager Mahncy Mehrotra (Meta) shared how discovery works in the Meta Horizon Store to help you focus on the levers that actually drive visibility and sustained sales.

Mahncy Mehrotra shared how ranking, curation, and retention shape visibility in the Meta Horizon Store.

Discovery flows through the Meta Horizon Store and Search across three surfaces: in-headset, mobile app, and web. Each surface reflects different user intent, so discovery behaves more like a funnel than a single "featured shelf."

How ranking drives visibility

Automated ranking primarily weighs two things:

Relevance: Is this the right experience for this user right now? Signals include user intent, search context, and browsing behavior.

Engagement potential: Will they actually play, and come back? Signals include time spent, session depth, and repeat engagement.

Where curation matters

Manual curation remains important and leans on quality and differentiation signals like star ratings, press coverage, community momentum, and whether your app brings something meaningfully new to the platform.

Steps you can start taking today

In practice, discovery increasingly rewards what happens after the install. Great store assets can earn clicks, but retention and repeat play drive where you rank up over time. Here are some recommendations:

Build for retention first (onboarding, early fun, performance, comfort).

Market beyond the Store: press, creators, and community still move the needle.

Refresh your Store assets regularly: screenshots and trailers go stale fast.

Validate pricing in VR: assumptions from mobile/console don't always translate.

Level Up LiveOps: The Gorilla Tag Playbook

Patricia Wayne (Product Manager, Meta) and David Yee (COO, Another Axiom) made a strong case that LiveOps is half the product instead of something developers figure out right before or after launch.

Gorilla Tag⁠'s staying power comes from three design principles:

Hand-based locomotion makes physical movement feel magical. You push against surfaces to move, creating an immediate tactile connection.

Social togetherness drives the core loop. The best moments happen with other players.

A world that pushes back. The environment feels consistent and responsive, building trust and encouraging experimentation.

That sense of tactile presence is worth studying even if you're building something completely different. VR retention improves when interaction feels inevitable rather than arbitrary. And while design is crucially important, the ongoing execution matters just as much.

Another Axiom ships updates every two weeks. That rhythm gives players something to look forward to. Each update mixes roadmap features, narrative beats, and experiments that are too fun to hold back. They treat community as part of the product pipeline, not a separate marketing effort.

Frequent updates keep players coming back. Another Axiom's approach: ship every two weeks and treat "perfect" as the enemy of good.

The numbers reflect this:

Gorilla Tag Discord: ~550K members

Gorilla Tag Fan Club community: 225K+ engaged fans

Creator Program: 500 active creators (as of February 2026), adding roughly 100 each month

With early access, exclusive perks, and deeper involvement, the Gorilla Tag Fan Club turns community into a core part of the product.

The team's philosophy: build your audience by building with them. Show up where your players already are.

On monetization, attendees learned that VR pricing doesn't follow mobile or console norms. Use price anchoring intentionally, test your assumptions, and use data to support your decisions.

The session also covered newer tools in the Developer Dashboard for LiveOps and in-app purchases:

Featured Bundles: Better visibility and simpler purchase flows

Multi-team Bundles: Bundle content across different organizations with configurable revenue splits

Season Pass: Auto-entitlement as content drops (limited trusted partner launch)

Add-On Analytics: find average revenue per user, entitlement sources, first-time vs. recurring buyers, and revenue by item.

Pre-order IAP Bundles (beta): Upsell IAP at pre-order, even for free-to-play launches

Plus a bonus: release channels now support up to 2,500 users for staged rollouts. That means you can validate stability and retention at meaningful scale, then ramp confidently with far less launch risk.

What to Do Next

Speed up your builds

Update to the latest Meta XR SDK and explore Building Blocks

Use Project Setup Tool from the start

Try the redesigned Meta XR Simulator for mixed reality and multiplayer testing

Connect AI to your workflow

Enable MCP in Meta Quest Developer Hub v6.2.1+ (Windows | Mac) to bring documentation, debugging, and asset search into your AI assistant

On Unity, try the AI Gateway⁠ extensions for editor-side automation

Optimize for retention

Review our discovery documentation

Discovery rewards engagement in addition to installs.

Refresh Store assets regularly and invest in creator and press relationships.

Treat pricing as something you test and iterate.

Follow the Live Service Checklist

Ship consistently

Establish a rhythm your players can count on.

Build community as a core part of your product.

Consider leveraging one or more of the monetization or engagement tools covered above in the Developer Dashboard.

Stay tuned for more updates coming from GDC 2026: follow us on X⁠ and Facebook⁠ for the latest updates, subscribe to our monthly newsletter⁠, and keep an eye out for full session recordings coming soon!

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