It’s certainly been a busy week for Facebook and Oculus with Oculus Connect 4 (OC4) having now closed for another year. The whirlwind that was the keynote speech certainly had a few surprises in store, with the company aggressively expanding its hardware range ahead of HTC launching its own standalone headset. One route Oculus isn’t following HTC on is subscriptions, with no plans on introducing a service.
During OC4, Oculus VP of Content Jason Rubin confirmed as much during an interview with Variety, citing that studios are already generating decent revenue from videogame sales. One area that he did note needs work is the monetisation of cinematic virtual reality (VR), with more experiences making their way to Oculus Rift and Gear VR.
The difficulty lies in VR content offering wildly different gameplay durations, as the technology beings to move away from short ‘tech demo’ experiences to much bigger titles offering hours and hours worth of entertainment. “How do you put those 2 things in a subscription and divide up the money?,” notes Rubin.
A situation that could arise with such a service is that decent, top tier videogames would stick to the standard model of consumers paying for each download, while less polished content would then be resigned to a subscription plan to get noticed. To which Rubin points out: “That’s not helping anybody.”
So for the time being Oculus is concentrating on it’s newly announced all-in-one headset Oculus Go, and continuing development with its inside-out tracking prototype Project Santa Cruz. Whilst these are both wireless, for current Oculus Rift users TPCAST announced yesterday that its working on a wireless adapter for the headset.
For the latest Oculus updates, keep reading VRFocus.
via Mint VR