Some Developers Will Get Valve's Vive VR Headset for Free

Valve and HTC will give their virtual reality headset Vive to some developers for free, Valve has announced.

Valve's spokesperson Doug Lombardi told Ars Technica that the company hopes to start taking requests from developers soon. "More info and 'sign up' forms will be available to all interested developers, big or small, via a new site coming soon," Lombardi said, adding that a new sign-up site might go live as early as next week.

So far, we've seen only a handful of developers make games for the Vive headset, like Owlchemy Labs, which is working on Job Simulator.

Giving the development kits away for free could help Valve and HTC encourage developers who are already making games for the Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus develop games for Vive as well, which Valve said will be out by the end of the year. Oculus, by comparison, currently charges $350 for development kits, while the Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition (which is powered by Oculus and a Galaxy Note 4 smartphone) is already for sale at Best Buy for $199.