In a recent blog post the Oculus team detailed how exactly selling and buying third party games will work with the Oculus Rift. First of all, developers are able to sell their games outside of the Oculus Rift store, manage their own in-app purchases and most importantly, do so without paying a fee to Oculus.

However, games sold outside of the Rift store will require users to enable the "Unknown Sources" setting in the Oculus desktop app in order to run them. The reasoning behind this decision is sensible, but somewhat strange, as you'll see in the following quote:

"If you’d like to ship outside the Oculus platform using the SDK, you can. People can access this content by enabling the “Unknown Sources” setting in the Oculus desktop app.

There are considerations when building Oculus PC apps on other platforms: for example, customers must be able to return Home and see Oculus platform overlays and notifications, including the health and safety notice."

If you're worried that the "Unknown Sources" setting is going to be buried in a basement, hidden behind a vault and guarded by a tiger, worry no longer as the whole process is rather simple. All you need to do is go to the Settings, select General, head over to the Unknown Sources section and just disable the feature, easy-peasy.

Personally, I think this is a completely valid decision, both for the reasons outlined above and because I'm certain Oculus wants to ensure only proper, finished games are featured to the players in order to not tarnish the Rift's reputation before it has even established one. I can, however, also understand why some might consider this a move towards a locked-down ecosystem most commonly found on mobile devices, except worse because we're talking about a "monitor" blocking your access, not an operating system.

With the Oculus Rift store still in its infancy, its going to be a while before we see the effects of this decision, and what exactly the competition will do as an answer. Until then, may I suggest checking out the current lineup of 30 VR focused games that will be launching alongside the Oculus Rift.