HTC announced a new software platform Thursday that aims to help with the creation of arcades. Viveport Arcade is designed to help arcade operators find games that are well-suited to the sort of public experience that they're building. It's built for the Taiwanese hardware maker's Vive headset.

"We see this moving very strongly in China, where there are basically thousands of these arcade operators opening up," said Rikard Steiber, senior vice president of Virtual Reality at HTC. "It's everything from the traditional internet cafes, to the arcades that are linked to cinemas, to basically independent operators and shopping malls opening them up as well."

Virtual reality headsets are still expensive, so companies have been working on ways to make them public attractions instead of private entertainment systems. HTC announced a a partnership deal Chinese internet cafes late last year, and Vive Arcade is a more formal way to create a steady flow of games and experiences.

At the 2016 VR Developers Conference in San Francisco, HTC announced that horror shooter The Brookhaven Experiment and climbing experience Everest VR will both be available as Arcade titles on the Viveport app. This means they can be commercially licensed for public Vive installations at movie theaters, internet cafes, or full VR arcades like Viveland, a flagship location that HTC opened in Taiwan last week. Steiber says that installations should be rolling out in the US and Europe by the end of the year.

Developers can opt in to the program when listing their projects on the Viveport app store, and arcade owners can buy "points" - essentially minutes of play - for each title, with the money split evenly between HTC and developers.

HTC will be competing with other companies offering their own flavor of VR location-based entertainment. A few virtual reality arcades have opened across the US, and IMAX has promised to open a series of experience centers powered by Starbreeze and Acer’s StarVR system. Bandai Namco developed its own Vive-powered experiences for a "VR Zone" in Tokyo.