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Oculus-Store

Roughly a month agone, we covered the Revive projection, which aimed to permit the HTC Vive to run titles reserved to the Oculus Store. At the time, 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. At present the company has made good on that position with a contempo Oculus Store update that includes a DRM check to ensure that the Oculus Rift is actually connected to your PC before launching titles.

Hither's how Revive developer CrossVR described the situation:

From my preliminary enquiry it seems that Oculus has also added a check whether the Oculus Rift headset is continued to their Oculus Platform DRM. And while Revive fools the application in thinking the Rift is continued, information technology does zip to make the actual Oculus Platform recollect the headset is connected.
Because but the Oculus Platform DRM has been changed this means that none of the Steam or standalone games were affected. Only games published on the Oculus Shop that use the Oculus Platform SDK are affected.
A temporary workaround if you have an Oculus Rift CV1 or DK2 is to proceed the headset and camera connected while starting the game. That should even so permit you lot to use your Vive headset to play the actual game, since Revive itself is nonetheless working.

The issue, in other words, is specifically linked to the Oculus Store, not a trouble 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 trouble. Whether people volition develop piece of work-arounds or other solutions is unknown at this bespeak.

The Oculus airtight garden

In that location are reasons for Oculus to take this pace. Since the games on the Oculus Shop are but intended for Oculus Rift owners, many of the complimentary titles available on the store front weren't developed or distributed with the goal of making them free to anyone who endemic a competitive VR headset.

Roughly 5 months ago, Palmer Luckey explained his views on the topic:

If customers buy a game from us, I don't care if they mod it to run on whatever they want. As I accept said a one thousand thousand times (and counter to the electric current circlejerk), our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware – if information technology was, why in the globe would we exist 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, not the Rift itself.

The issue is people who expect united states to officially support all headsets on a platform level with some kind of universal Oculus SDK, which is non going to happen anytime soon. We do desire to work with other hardware vendors, but non at the expense of our ain launch, and certainly not in a way that leads to developing for the everyman mutual denominator.

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

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

GoGGalaxy

GoG is the closest affair Steam has to a competitor, but its sales are believed to exist a fraction of Valve's.

Oculus wants to be the preferred platform for VR gaming going forward, but Steam already is the preferred platform for PC gaming today. If titles on the Oculus Shop can run on 3rd-party hardware, there'southward no incentive to buy the Rift. If no ane buys the Rift, the Rift's ecosystem won't grow very well and developers won't be 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's being truthful. In the short-term, Oculus does demand people to buy the Rift but the long-term plan is to create an Oculus ecosystem. Once anybody thinks of the Oculus Store as the source for VR titles rather than a platform like Steam, Oculus could magnanimously offer support 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 written report the developer of Steam Spy, Sergey Galyonkin, estimated that the Steam paid games market earned Valve $iii.v billion in acquirement in 2022, not counting annihilation earned in gratuitous-to-play titles or in DLC. That figure explains everything about why Palmer Luckey wants the Oculus Store to exist the premiere destination for VR content. Even 5% of Steam'south revenue would be worth $175 meg — and the only adventure Oculus has of taking on the titan of game distribution is to strike fast from solar day one and build back up for its ain platform. Companies that expect to evaluate customer prototype shifts before entering the market oft lose their shirts (Showroom A: Intel and Microsoft).

As of this writing, information technology is not articulate if the Revive project will be able to bypass the copy protection or not. CrossVR has stated that this would be difficult, merely that he is looking into the situation.