​Viveport President on HTC’s New VR Subscription Service

April 4th was the one-year anniversary of the HTC Vive, and HTC released the subscription service for Viveport for $7/month to try out five new VR applications per month. I had a chance to catch up with Viveport president Rikard Steiber at GDC to talk about the genre differences between Viveport and Steam, future support of VR headsets beyond the Vive, their support for delivering content to China, as well as some of their arcade licensing options.

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Viveport is the first subscription service for high-end and room-scale virtual reality, and HTC has a chance to leapfrog other content companies like Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, and Google’s YouTube to bring the subscription business model to VR content. Time will tell whether or not HTC will get into producing original content like other film subscription services have, as well as how much new and high-quality content Viveport is going to introduce to the platform each month. But for now, paying $7 to try out five new VR experiences a month is a great deal worth considering.

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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip