Oculus is adding beta support for DLC to its app store for Rift, though “full DLC support in the Oculus Store is not yet available.”
The mobile store (Oculus Go and Samsung Gear VR) received support for DLC shortly after the Go launch in May, when the company stated that Rift support was “coming soon”.
DLC has actually been available on the Oculus Rift store since early 2017, but only for the game Rock Band VR. This, however, was a custom solution for the game, which was a major title in the months following the Oculus Touch release rather than a platform feature. This week’s update makes it a general feature for any Rift developer to use.
The feature is not only for paid DLC, but could also be used to lower the initial download size by only downloading the core or start of the game, then downloading the rest “on the fly” when it’s needed. This is more useful on mobile platforms where space is limited or standalone headsets where waiting for a download in VR is boring, but it could have some use for extremely large games on PC too.
Steam has had DLC support for over a decade now, and the lack of it on the Oculus Store had prevented several developers from bringing their games to it. With DLC support now in place, these developers can finally bring their DLC dependent games to Facebook’s platform.
Clarification: The first sentence of this post was updated with a note from the Oculus’ developer’s blog post explaining the status of the feature’s roll-out.
