How to bypass the Oculus Store and play SteamVR games on Rift

Oculus VR has its own store for the Rift virtual reality headset, but you don’t have to use it.

The first wave of Rifts are heading out today to people who preordered and backed the crowdfunding project on Kickstarter, and the device has launched with 30 games that you can buy through the Oculus Store or through other sites like Steam. Valve Software, the company that owns and operates Steam, even has an Oculus Rift filter so that you can see the games that are compatible with that headset. These include the space-survival game Adr1ft, the grappling-action adventure Windlands, and the hyperfast racer Radial-G: Racing Revolved.

Tech adviser Digi-Capital expects that the VR industry is going to grow into a $30 billion business by 2020, and gaming will make up a significant chunk of that. But while Oculus VR wants to grab a piece of that through its Store, it also wants players to feel like they have choices since they are billing Rift as an open platform.

Like with other platforms that are essentially open, like Android, you need to select an option that enables games to run from “Unkonwn Sources.” Here are the instructions on how to do that from Oculus’s support site:

1. Start Oculus home on your PC and expand the dropdown menu.
2. Click on “Settings.”
3. Select “General.”
4. Find “Unknown Sources.”
5. Click the button to toggle it so that a circle appears and not an X.

You’re good to go. Your SteamVR games that support Rift will now work in your headset.

Now that you own the game through Steam, you can launch the game on both the Rift or the HTC Vive once it begins shipping next week. At the same time, Rift developers that sell their games on Steam can request codes from Oculus to ensure you can still boot up any Steam games from inside the Oculus home screen. Studios can request an infinite number of keys for free, so it’s likely that we’ll see a lot of developers take advantage of this option.