At IFA this year, Samsung offered us a glimpse of its own take on virtual reality. The Gear VR is part of a collaboration with Oculus and aims to bring virtual reality to the mobile gaming masses. As with any new platform, apps are the make-or-break-it feature and there’s money to be made in developing for Gear VR. Unfortunately, developers hoping to have their games ready to sell at launch won’t be making any money at all.
Polygon reports developers “will be forced to give their games away,” as in, for free. Apparently, devs aren’t happy that the work they put their blood, sweat, tears, and time into games for Gear VR.
What’s interesting is that this isn’t Samsung and Oculus hoping to drive early adoption with a raft of free games at launch. Instead, Oculus’ Nate Mitchell has admitted to Polygon that the lack of monetization at launch is down to the complexities of developing a payments system. “Payments are hard,” he’s quoted as saying. “We have not rolled out our payment infrastructure as fast as we’d want.”
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this is that Samsung isn’t willing to delay in order for the team working on payments to catch up. Though we’ve heard about the device multiple times throughout the year, it’s official debut was at IFA a few weeks ago. Samsung hasn’t given us a release date, but the company has already indicated that it will be available to buy in Canada in the fall. That is some serious hustle, especially when you consider the consumer version of Oculus Rift won’t be available until April 2015.
[source]Polygon[/source]
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