In a past few weeks Oculus has made some controversial decisions regarding their Rift VR headset. One of which is placing headset-checking DRM into their platform. However things seem to have changed again. Fortunately for the better.
Rift exclusives, not a good step into right direction
Since the launch of Rift VR headset, Oculus has made decisions which not many people liked. One of those decisions is Rift exclusive games which only work with Rift VR headset. This resulted in a group of developers making a mod called “Revive.” This mod allows users to play Rift exclusive titles on other VR headsets, such as HTC Vive.
However Oculus didn’t really like these practices. After Revive mod had got more popular they implemented a headset-checking DRM which effectivelly blocked Revive mod, forbidding users from using other headsets with Rift exclusive titles. This forced Revive developers to update the mod to bypass the headset-check completely. This however caused some headaches for Oculus because the updated mod had made pirating games on Oculus platform much easier.
Oculus removes DRM from their platform, good step into right direction
It seems like that Oculus has changed their mind yet again. For the better. The news broke when a Revive developer updated Revive’s changelog on Github claiming that Oculus had silently removed the DRM feature.
“I’ve only just tested this and I’m still in disbelief, but it looks like Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus Runtime 1.5. As such I’ve reverted the DRM patch and removed all binaries from previous releases that contained the patch.” says Revive developer LibreVR.
This is very good news for everyone and the VR industry as a whole. We can see that Oculus is willing to listen to their community and they don’t want to completely hard-lock Rift exclusives only to Rift. However that doesn’t mean that Oculus has completely changed their mindset about Oculus exclusive titles. As another Revive developer CrossVR says:
“I don’t think they changed their stance on exclusivity, but they’re at least willing to meet us halfway by letting us mod our games.”
Oculus also officially confirmed this move to Motherboard.