MENLO PARK, Calif. – The adult industry has seen this movie before: A new consumer technology arrives to great fanfare, the potential boon to the industry represented by the device or platform is manifest and obvious, but the market cap never grows to what it should be as a matter of policy.
Just last month at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference in San Jose, Oculus VR founder Palmer Lucky declared the Rift would be an “open platform” and proclaimed there would be no control exercised over the software run on the device.
“We don’t control what software can run on it,” Lucky said. “And that’s a big deal.”
Actually, it would be a big deal — except what Lucky didn’t address during his presentation was the question of whether sexually explicit apps and content will be made available to consumers through the official VR app store. The answer turns out to be a big, fat, highly unsurprising no.
“Oculus only distributes developer content that meets their terms of service, which forbids pornographic content from being a part of the Oculus Store,” a Facebook representative told FastCompany.com.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the policy is almost identical to the relationship between Android devices and porn: Third parties are welcome to develop pornographic apps for the devices, but those apps are not allowed in the on-deck Android store.
Some might think this is a minor detail, a small bump in the road when you consider how popular VR porn is bound to become with consumers, but ask any app developer who has placed apps in an official app store vs. third party app store and they will tell you off-deck store sales are a minuscule fraction of official store sales.
This is not to say there won’t be money in Oculus porn and other varieties of VR porn, but it does mean developers will have to work much harder to rake the bucks in their direction. Consumers have become very much accustomed to convenience. Every additional click or tap required to locate and retrieve a product, be it an app or a piece of content, significantly reduces the product’s sales potential.
VR porn faces other obstacles, of course, not the least of which is a strong contingent within the modern market who believe the proper price of porn is always $0. The assumption is many consumers will be more willing to pay for the VR porn experience than the standard flat, two-dimensional variety, but in case you haven’t noticed, VR-dedicated porn tubes already exist. If VR porn does catch on, such sites will proliferate.
There’s a strong correlation between access, price points and piracy. In markets where products are not available at all through legitimate means, or in which price points exceed consumer willingness (or ability) to pay, piracy flourishes with particular intensity.
Ease of access isn’t just about having goods available online, particularly when you’re talking about devices that have true on-deck stores available at the touch of an icon right on the home screen. Oculus Rift won’t have such functionality, because at its core the Oculus is really a piece of external hardware, meaning consumers will use their desktops to access the app store and make their purchases. So, by comparison to an iPhone or Android device, it will be slightly less convenient to make Oculus app purchases.
There’s also the issue of consumer trust. Presumably, the official Oculus store will be more trusted than third-party app stores, particularly stores dedicated to offering apps that fail to meet the primary app store’s criteria. Plus, whether or not it’s actually true, some in the media and the “security experts” they interview will come up with data showing VR porn apps are a common vector for VR malware, leading consumers to dream up Phillip K. Dick-like sci-fi scenarios in which their headsets gradually transform them into mindless automatons taking murderous orders from shadowy men with the Hollywood approximation of a German accent.
Despite the obstacles, money will be made from VR porn. How much money and by whom remains to be seen, but no matter how you slice it, porn’s banishment from the official Oculus app store just ain’t good news for VR porn entrepreneurs.
Hopefully the people who are most serious about giving VR porn a go as a revenue stream anticipated this policy development and already have accounted for lack of official app store placement when projecting future revenues. If not, the latest virtual content policy proclamation from Facebook Central might come as a literal shock.
