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Oculus-Store

For the by few weeks, there's been a storm swirling in virtual reality between Oculus and HTC Vive owners. Last month, Oculus rolled out a DRM solution as part of the Oculus Shop's software. The purpose of the patch was to make information technology impossible to play Oculus Store games on headsets similar HTC's Vive, fifty-fifty if the games in question were legally purchased. The visitor has now reversed course on this strategy and removed the DRM lockout.

Oculus, however, hasn't done anything to brand that change public. The news came instead from the developers of the Revive project, which aimed to allow HTC Vive owners to play Oculus Store titles. Initially, Revive merely allowed gamers to play titles they'd legally purchased. Only when Oculus added its own DRM lockout, the Revive developers responded by implementing workarounds that allowed Oculus Store games to be pirated and run on HTC Vive headsets. While this wasn't the original intent of the Revive project, it was the only way to maintain cantankerous-platform headset compatibility.

LuckyTale

Lucky's Tale was supposed to be an exclusive. Cheers to these changes, it will exist once more.

With Oculus no longer using DRM, Revive has already been patched to remove the hooks that bypassed it and allowed players to pirate games. As recently as yesterday, Oculus head of developer strategy Anna Sweet was still defending the dubious statement that Palmer Luckey's comments about allowing interoperability on the Oculus Shop was meant solely to employ to individuals who got their own headsets working, but not any kind of larger software initiative.

"Yeah, I retrieve Palmer'south original statements were more focused on individual customers, who buy a piece of content and they choose to mod it," Sweet told Gamespot. "I recall that's split up from a systemic, platform-broad pack that rips out protections for developers on their content."

Leaving bated Sweet's mischaracterization of the nature of Revive, the entire affair left a bad taste in consumers' mouths. The full general view among VR enthusiasts is that the VR ecosystem needs to be every bit open every bit possible to ensure maximum adoption and back up. Splitting support between various platforms makes it fifty-fifty harder for would-be VR gamers to justify the incredibly loftier toll of adopting both platforms. While Microsoft and Sony take both succeeded in building their own console ecosystems, there are huge amounts of overlap between what the ii consoles can practice — both support pop streaming applications like Netflix and back up most of the same games.

The visitor separately confirmed it had removed all DRM from the Oculus Store and pledged to keep things that way in the time to come. "We believe protecting programmer content is critical to the long-term success of the VR industry, and nosotros'll continue taking steps in the time to come to ensure that VR developers can go along investing in footing-breaking new VR content," a company spokesperson told Ars Technica.

The company'southward statements still seem to conflate protecting Oculus exclusives with helping VR developers build great VR content — two goals that aren't mutually exclusive past any means. Developers may have been part of the reason Oculus changed its tune; we can't imagine many companies were happy nearly the state of affairs as it played out with Revive. Hopefully with this outcome settled, we won't see future efforts to dissever the nascent VR ecosystem between multiple vendors.

Oculus latest patch notes are available here. They don't mention the DRM removal, but discuss several other bug with AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs.