In a tweet today, John Carmack gave mobile VR developers the news that they had been waiting to hear for a while, a paid app store.
Paid apps are live on the Oculus Gear VR store!
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 2, 2015
This is great news for anyone who has been developing on the platform. Until this point, options were limited as to how developers could monetize their apps. The Cardboard utilized the existing app store infrastructure that Google had in place, but Oculus needed to build something entirely from the ground up for their Gear VR system.
Now that this is in place, it only seems like a matter of time before we see similar action taken for the desktop version. Currently developers can list their game for sale on the Rift Arcade or on Steam but there is no official app store for desktop VR, only the Share website from Oculus.
Hopefully the promise of monetization gets more developers working on the mobile platform, which despite its limitations is a really effective platform for VR.
