Valve wants developers to begin work on Steam VR as soon as possible. And to gain mainstream and indie developers interest, it's offering the HTC Vive VR headset for free to qualifying developers.

It's not clear how many units will be available, nor how Valve intends to sift through the thousands of applications from developers. Bossa Studios, creators of "Surgeon Simulator" and "I Am Bread" along with Cloudhead Games, Fireproof Games and Owlchemy Labs have already received the developer kit.

Like Us on Facebook

The developer kit contains more than just the headset. Valve will add two controllers (most likely Steam controllers) and two base stations. The base stations will allow the headset to track head and body movement to give a more immersive feel when using Steam VR.

It's a different approach to Oculus' Kickstarter, allowing enthusiasts and developers to pay $350 for the VR headset. This allowed more global adoption of the headset but limited the number of actual developers capable of producing titles.

Valve is tailoring its choices to both large scale studios and indies, looking for a variety of new games from all types of studios. Sony has been using a similar tactic for over a year now on Project Morpheus, seeing thousands of units to developers all across the world.

The real question is when the first real consumer edition VR headset will launch. HTC has its eyes set on November 2015 to coincide with the launch of Valve's controller and Steam Machines, but it could suffer delays if the software is not perfect.

Sony has a 2016 launch date for Project Morpheus and Oculus still hasn't given a clear roadmap for when it will finally launch a consumer edition headset.

TagsValve, HTC Vive, Virtual Reality