HTC Viveport Subscription Service is Coming Soon and the First Month is Free

[cageymaru]

HTC's Viveport subscription service is rolling out in the coming weeks for Vive owners. As an added bonus, HTC has decided to make the first month free! This will allows everyone to try it out and see if it's for them. When a user subscribes to an app, they effectively check it out from the library. The Viveport license allows for a handful of apps to be checked out at one time. When customers want a new app, they have to return the license for a rented app to the library first. This means that you can only have a few apps out at a time. Good thing that there is a free trial as this might not be the best solution for Australians and others with metered internet access.

The profit split seems generous at 60% for developers and 40% for HTC. It is not known how the 60% will be divided up among the developers. Pricing for the service is expected to be announced at the upcoming 2017 Game Developers Conference and Mobile World Congress. I think it could be a great promotional tool to get the word out about a new game as a developer could feature it on the service for a limited time period for example. Or maybe a VR game has been out for a year and the developer is trying to squeeze every dollar out of it's software so they place it on the service. Of course all of this will depend upon the pricing of the service as overcharging will keep people away.

Depending on the final price of the service this could be a great way to get more people engaging with more VR content, and add an extra source of revenue for developers. Last week Vive co-creator Valve said that only 30 of 1,300 VR apps on Steam had made over $250,000, so it’s important to developers to seek other means of income for their apps beyond a single digital storefront. To that end, they might also look to HTC’s Viveport Arcade plan, which offers a similar approach to granting access to apps for location-based VR.

 

[heatlesssun]

Sounds interesting. A lot of those VR apps are very cheap, like $3 or $4 dollars, so those kinds of apps breaking a $250,000 would be tough even if they were great, and a couple that I've bought are pretty cool. For something this niche the more ways to get money into the better if we want to see progress.

 

[rudedog]

Sorry I'll pay $3-$4 an app over a subscription any day.

 

[Shmee]

Wait, so I am subscribing, but I still have to 'check out' games? No thanks.

 

[MavericK]

I wasn't super interested in Viveport when it first came out, and this hasn't really changed my mind. Happy to play SteamVR games.

 

[DPI]

Subscription service for VR games could work out great for titles that are short experiences, and/or you may only play a couple times. In the end it just amounts to one more way to get content. I was kind of skeptical about EA's subscription service on Origin at first, but it's cheap enough that the math makes a lot of sense for certain titles, let's say where you'll play the SP campaign for once and never again.

I suspect its inevitable that Steam offers its own subscription style service, that publishers opt in to ofcourse. They've got an entire department dedicated to crunching the numbers on these decisions.

 

[sir-gold]

The title of the linked article is "Viveport Subscriptions To Feature Free Trial Month, First Apps Revealed", yet the one thing that is missing from the article (and the sub-linked Vanity article) is what those "first apps" actually are.

The image in the article is for the developer awards and not the list of Viveport games (I hope).

AltspaceVR and The Body VR are outright free, and Fantastic Contraption is free with the purchase of a Vive (or a least it was), so there is no reason you would pay to 'rent' them.

 

[sir-gold]

Subscription service for VR games could work out great for titles that are short experiences, and/or you may only play a couple times. In the end it just amounts to one more way to get content. I was kind of skeptical about EA's subscription service on Origin at first, but it's cheap enough that the math makes a lot of sense for certain titles, let's say where you'll play the SP campaign for once and never again.

I suspect its inevitable that Steam offers its own subscription style service, that publishers opt in to ofcourse. They've got an entire department dedicated to crunching the numbers on these decisions.

I don't know how much HTC will like being shoved even deeper into the "just a hardware supplier" category by having Steam-rentals compete directly against Viveport-rentals, especially when Steam is required to use the Vive, but Viveport is optional.