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Oculus-Store

Roughly a month agone, nosotros covered the Revive project, which aimed to allow the HTC Vive to run titles reserved to the Oculus Store. At the fourth dimension, Oculus' official position was that this was an unsupported hack, and that anyone who took advantage of information technology shouldn't count on it sticking around for very long. Now the company has made good on that position with a recent Oculus Store update that includes a DRM bank check to ensure that the Oculus Rift is really connected to your PC before launching titles.

Here'south how Revive developer CrossVR described the state of affairs:

From my preliminary research it seems that Oculus has too added a check whether the Oculus Rift headset is connected to their Oculus Platform DRM. And while Revive fools the awarding in thinking the Rift is connected, it does nothing to make the actual Oculus Platform think the headset is connected.
Because merely the Oculus Platform DRM has been changed this ways that none of the Steam or standalone games were affected. Just games published on the Oculus Shop that use the Oculus Platform SDK are afflicted.
A temporary workaround if you take an Oculus Rift CV1 or DK2 is to keep the headset and camera connected while starting the game. That should still allow you to use your Vive headset to play the actual game, since Revive itself is nevertheless working.

The issue, in other words, is specifically linked to the Oculus Store, non a problem with the Vive or Revive application. Since Revive isn't designed to bypass a platform-level check with the Oculus Store, it doesn't featherbed the problem. Whether people will develop work-arounds or other solutions is unknown at this point.

The Oculus closed garden

There are reasons for Oculus to take this step. Since the games on the Oculus Store are only intended for Oculus Rift owners, many of the free titles available on the store front weren't developed or distributed with the goal of making them gratis to anyone who owned a competitive VR headset.

Roughly v months agone, Palmer Luckey explained his views on the topic:

If customers purchase a game from us, I don't care if they mod information technology to run on whatever they desire. As I have said a million times (and counter to the current circlejerk), our goal is not to profit by locking people to just our hardware – if it was, why in the globe would we be supporting GearVR and talking with other headset makers? The software we create through Oculus Studios (using a mix of internal and external developers) are sectional to the Oculus platform, non the Rift itself.

The upshot is people who await us to officially support all headsets on a platform level with some kind of universal Oculus SDK, which is not going to happen anytime presently. We do desire to work with other hardware vendors, but not at the expense of our ain launch, and certainly not in a way that leads to developing for the lowest common denominator.

This contempo activeness to add together DRM to the store itself undercuts Luckey's claim that gamers who buy titles from the Oculus Store are free to mod them to run on whatever they desire — but it dovetails perfectly with the rest of his comments. Oculus doesn't necessarily want to but sell games to Oculus owners in the long-term, but information technology must create a premium niche for itself every bit a preferred destination for VR content.

To understand why, step dorsum and consider the PC gaming ecosystem. It's overwhelmingly dominated by Steam with GOG in second place. Services like EA'due south Origin or Ubisoft's uPlay are the preferred digital sales channels for those companies' specific titles, but neither has built a strong portfolio beyond that point.

GoGGalaxy

GoG is the closest thing Steam has to a competitor, only its sales are believed to exist a fraction of Valve'due south.

Oculus wants to be the preferred platform for VR gaming going forrard, but Steam already is the preferred platform for PC gaming today. If titles on the Oculus Store can run on third-party hardware, in that location's no incentive to buy the Rift. If no 1 buys the Rift, the Rift's ecosystem won't grow very well and developers won't exist interested in prioritizing a platform no one is using.

When Luckey says his goal isn't to lock people into buying Rift hardware but that universal support is a long ways off, he'southward beingness truthful. In the brusque-term, Oculus does need people to buy the Rift but the long-term programme is to create an Oculus ecosystem. In one case everyone thinks of the Oculus Shop as the source for VR titles rather than a platform like Steam, Oculus could magnanimously offering back up to other headsets, particularly if the manufacturers of those headsets are willing to pay for some type of brand licensing and "Compatible with the Oculus Shop" stickers.

A recent report the developer of Steam Spy, Sergey Galyonkin, estimated that the Steam paid games market earned Valve $3.5 billion in acquirement in 2015, not counting anything earned in free-to-play titles or in DLC. That figure explains everything near why Palmer Luckey wants the Oculus Shop to be the premiere destination for VR content. Even v% of Steam's revenue would be worth $175 one thousand thousand — and the just hazard Oculus has of taking on the titan of game distribution is to strike fast from day 1 and build back up for its ain platform. Companies that look to evaluate customer paradigm shifts before entering the market often lose their shirts (Exhibit A: Intel and Microsoft).

As of this writing, it is not articulate if the Revive projection will be able to featherbed the copy protection or not. CrossVR has stated that this would exist difficult, but that he is looking into the situation.