Last month HTC announced that the company’s Viveport VR app store would allow developers to sell titles supporting the Oculus Rift. Today the company has official opened Viveport to Rift, which is now supported by nearly 200 games and apps at the time of this writing.
Update (September 4th, 2018): Viveport games now have a brand new Oculus badge, indicating support for Oculus Rift is now live. The original article follows below.
Original Article (August 17th, 2018): HTC has been making moves to promote its Viveport VR app store, an alternative to the de facto content platform for the HTC Vive, SteamVR. Having recently announced a partnership in which users can buy VR apps through Amazon, HTC is now making good on the headset-agnostic promises made regarding the content platform.
The company announced this week that developers can begin offering titles which have Oculus Rift compatibility in addition to the company’s own Vive, with Rift support kicking off in earnest on September 4th. It’s our understanding that this multi-headset compatibility is achieved through the same OpenVR compatibility that allows SteamVR titles to work with both the Vive and the Rift.
The move means that Oculus Rift users will be able to purchase and download select content that developers designate as compatible with the Rift, and also access content through Viveport Subscription, a $9/month subscription service which gives users unlimited access to five titles of their choice (among some 500 in the Viveport Subscription catalog), with the ability to swap out for five new titles each month.
Since launch, Viveport has struggled to find a compelling differentiator to make it stand out against SteamVR which has long offered compatibility with both the Vive and the Rift, and a larger VR library. Viveport Subscription was introduced in 2017 apparently in an effort to create a unique offering, though it’s not clear if the program has done much to add traction to the platform which has historically been critiqued for poor performance and a trailing content library.