With its Rift development kit program , Oculus has charged $300 to $350 to tens of thousands of developers (and doubtless some ultra-early-adopting consumers) who wanted to get their hands on early versions of the headset. Valve is going in a different direction with the Vive VR headset it's developing in conjunction with HTC, offering an early Developer Edition for free to qualified developers.

So far, Valve and HTC have seeded kits to a handful of specially chosen developers, including Owlchemy Labs (Aaaaaa! For The Awesome), Bossa Studios (Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread), Fireproof Games (The Room), and Cloudhead Games (The Gallery). Others will have to wait; "more info and 'sign up' forms will be available to all interested developers, big or small, via a new site coming soon," Valve spokesperson Doug Lombardi told Ars Technica. The current hope is to get the sign-up site up and running next week, Lombardi says.

Approved developers will get a Developer Edition kit that "will be free, at least initially," Lombardi said. Those kits will start shipping later in the spring as part of an "ongoing effort" to get the development hardware out widely ahead of a planned 2015 consumer launch. The decision to release it for free is interesting given that HTC Connected Products Marketing Executive Director Jeff Gattis recently said consumers should expect "a slightly higher price point" for the final version of the hardware.

Demand for what's sure to be a limited number of free development kits is likely to be extremely high, but Lombardi hasn't addressed how developers will be prioritized to receive the hardware. While developers "big and small" will be welcome to apply for consideration, it's unclear what kind of mix will be chosen to get access to the first available Developer Edition units. It's also unclear just how many development kits will be available in the initial batch of spring shipments.

HTC notes on its developer page that the Vive Developer Edition will be available "to select developers" in the spring, and the company offers an e-mail list for further updates. Valve's SteamVR landing page notes that the Developer Edition "comes with a headset, two controllers and two base stations—everything you need to dive in and start creating new interactive VR experiences."

Unlike Oculus' Rift distribution plan, Valve's system should make it more difficult for members of the general public (and the press) to get their hands on still-in-development hardware ahead of the consumer release. This has been the standard operating procedure for gaming hardware for most of the industry's history—most everyday consumers never get a chance to sample an upcoming console until it's available on store shelves. Even developers often have to spend tens of thousands of dollars for early dev kit access, though prices for that kind of access have reportedly been coming down in recent console cycles, especially for independent developers.

Virtual reality could be a bit different, though, as companies compete to offer public demos and early access that proves the concept is finally viable to a somewhat skeptical public and development community. At GDC earlier this month, Oculus CTO John Carmack said he had been wary of making the unfinished Gear VR available to the public as an "Innovator Edition" late last year, but he said "a funny thing happened [after we launched]—people kind of like it. When we look back at it, the hardware that Samsung developed probably could have gone wide [as a full consumer product]."

Sony has been distributing Project Morpheus development kits to partner developers worldwide since last year and has publicly expressed interest in attracting independent developers to the headset. "The indie teams typically want to create something not directly competitive with big companies because they know they don't have the resource to do it, so they try to come up with a new angle or approach, a new experience so that their game can stand out," Sony head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida told Polygon about a year ago. "We don't want people to think, ‘How can I port this game to VR?' We want people to think, ‘What unique thing can we do with this tech?' So I'm very, very excited to give lots of units to indie PS4 developers."