Oculus VR had its pre-E3 press conference on June 13th and announced, among other things, that it would be hosting its own app store for the virtual reality headset once it goes on sale in Q1 2016.
Similar to how Apple runs its own app store, this Oculus Store will be curated by Oculus VR, and the apps will even be rated by the company for their content. This invites a number of questions about the types of content that Oculus VR will admit on to its app store. Apple is notoriously strict in what it lets on its own app store, disallowing sex, some violence, and any negative depiction of real life parties (i.e. people and companies). So what kind of curator will Oculus VR be?
Business Insider managed to ask a representative from Oculus VR to briefly talk about this and the answers aren’t all too surprising. On the topic of pornography, this was said: “Oculus only distributes developer content that meets their terms of service, which forbid pornographic content from being a part of the Oculus Store.”
A firm stance, then – absolutely no pornographic content. But when asked about violent content the representative was a little more hazy. “Oculus only distributes developer content that meets their terms of service, but they aren’t open to discuss what those terms are at this time,” the representative said.
Nothing either way in terms of violence, then. However, given that Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey turned up on stage during the press conference and demoed the new Oculus Touch controllers by explaining that they’ve been designed for you to pick up, fire, and drop a gun, it’s likely that violence will be much more welcome than pornographic content.
That’s expected at this point considering that most of the videogame industry shares a similar view on both sex and violence. Whether there will be any limits on to how violent a game or film can be on the Oculus Store is yet to be revealed, of course.
