Oculus is launching subscriptions for apps like Rec Room and FitXR - Android

Subscriptions will make it easier for developers to launch premium and free-to-play experiences.

What you need to know

• Facebook has upgraded the Oculus Store with Oculus subscriptions, a new way to subscribe to participating apps each month.
• Individual apps have their own subscription costs and are designed to deliver fresh content every month, as well as additional perks.
• Oculus subscriptions should open the way for more free-to-play content and help developers earn new revenue streams, as well as provide access to players who might not otherwise pay for a title upfront.

When you look at the mobile game landscape, many of the best Android games are of the free-to-play variety. That means you can download the game and play for free but, often, developers will give you ways of purchasing content at your leisure. Up to this point, the same type of experience wasn't readily available on platforms like the Oculus Quest 2, but Facebook is changing that today with Oculus subscriptions.

Now, we've seen subscriptions before with games like Supernatural — a fitness title that delivers daily workouts led by trainers and featuring a curated playlist — but this new model is designed to work more like a mobile platform where developers can still offer a base game to players while simultaneously offering some type of premium content on top of that. Oculus details some specific launch experiences in its blog post about the subject, but we'll highlight a few here.

Rec Room — one if the best Quest 2 games — is launching Rec Room Plus on the Quest platform today. Rec Room Plus costs $7.99 per month and gives players 6,000 tokens monthly (a $10 value in and of itself), as well as a four-star item every week and access to the exclusive Rec Room Plus section of the store, with additional perks to follow. Similarly, FitXR is launching a service similar to Supernatural where players will pay $9.99 per month — that's half the cost of Supernatural — and will be able to participate in a new and unique trainer-led session every single day of the month. Existing FitXR players will get a free 90-day trial, too.

Several other games are also adding subscriptions today including Tribe XR, TRIPP, vSpatial, and VZfit. Each of these apps offers a similar take on the subscription concept that delivers new content to players while allowing them to keep anything they've purchased up until now. That means all of those apps you've already spent money on aren't going to change for the worse for you (at least we would hope not); they'll just be adding new content for subscribers going forward. The free-to-play model generally means that more players have immediate access to more experiences, while also offering developers the possibility for new revenue streams they didn't have before.