Oculus Rift store games will need be approved and rated for comfort

The Oculus Rift is going to come with its own Apple-like app store—with its own Apple-like restrictions limiting what can be on there. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe revealed to TechCrunch that software will need to be reviewed and pre-approved before it's allowed on their store, and that approved titles will then be rated for 'comfort'. (Note that you will be able to release games/software outside of the Oculus Store, without suffering any of these restrictions.)

“We are going to monitor the content and make sure that it fits the policy we put up which is this safe and clean environment that everyone can know, and love, and trust just like other popular app stores…You’re going to need to be approved first.”

'Comfort' is obviously a bit of an open term, but it appears that games that will make you feel dizzy, scared or otherwise stressed will receive low comfort ratings. Here's a seemingly mocked-up image of how that will look:

“Something can be comfortable from a disorientation standpoint," Iribe explains, "where it doesn’t make me feel bad…it doesn’t have crazy locomotion like a roller coaster. But if it is really, really super intense, we do want to give people warnings about that.”

“Having bullets fly at you in VR is actually really, really intense and the more real it gets, the more it’s going to feel like real life, and you don’t really want to be shot at in real life.”

“We’ve gotten really used to it on the 2D monitor because our brain is saying ‘don’t worry, don’t worry, it’s safe.’ As soon as you put on VR and your brain’s not saying that anymore, it’s not necessarily the comfortable experience that it is on a monitor, and we’ll have warnings around that.”

Ta, VG247.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.