SAN FRANCISCO — For game designers, virtual reality became a real business last week when the virtual reality equivalent of Apple’s app store for iPhones and iPads opened its digital doors.

If you make a game in virtual reality, or V.R., now you can sell it to customers instead of giving it away free. It’s the biggest step yet toward discovering what kinds of creative works will prove most successful in this new medium — an immersive, sensorially isolating experience that is either the art form of the 21st century or the biggest fad of 2016.

Last Monday, the store inside the Gear VR, a headset powered by a fancy Samsung phone and the technology of Oculus VR (the company Facebook acquired for $2 billion last year), opened for business at the start of the Game Developers Conference here.

Samsung and Oculus don’t advertise the Gear VR as a consumer product. They prefer to call it an “innovator edition” for early adopters. But you can buy it, and if you own it, you can spend your money — for now all the games are $10 or less — on the first wave of virtual reality games to hit the marketplace.