HTC Opens the Doors of its VR Streaming Service to Developers
If there’s one company that has faith in the future of VR, it’s HTC. This week the company officially welcomed developers to its Viveport VR subscription service, giving them the chance to register their games and VR experiences.
HTC announced plans to launch the subscription service for its HTC Vive VR headset at CES earlier this year, and since then, upwards of 14,000 consumers have signed up to be notified about the service, according to Viveport President Rikard Steiber in an interview with Variety. Though the company has yet to set final pricing for the service, Steiber said it would be similar to the monthly cost of Netflix or Spotify.
The monthly fee will allow user to download a limited number of games at a time for their HTC Vive headset — Steiber said only “a handful” would be available at the same time, but users could then decide to “trade in” one of the games in order to download a new one.
The company hopes to use the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco to put pressure on developers and publishers, persuading them to sign up ahead of the official consumer launch in the coming weeks. “We are trying to create some urgency,” said Steiber.
The subscription service is set to launch later this spring.
