What do you think of Oculus’s DRM approach?
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So it is that within a month of launching, Oculus VR found that users of the rival HTC Vive virtual reality headset had devised a workaround to get Oculus-exclusive games running on the hardware.
At the time, we wondered whether Oculus will do something to stop Revive. This approach may end up driving more gamers towards owning a HTC Vive than reward Oculus VR for its decision.
Regardless of which side of that fence you come down on, the fact that Revive no longer works should come as no surprise to anyone: Oculus said when Revive was first released that it not condone the hack, and warned, as it did above, that future updates to its apps “are likely to break hacked software”. Luckey took to Reddit in December of a year ago to respond to claims that Oculus might ever lock its software platform in any way, particularly in terms of inviting other headset owners to play Oculus games.
According to Libre VR, what seems to be happening is that Oculus’ DRM now checks to see whether an Oculus Rift is connected to the PC when playing a game bought from the Oculus store. This update comes courtesy of the Oculus App 1.4 update that rolled out yesterday. “We take the security, functionality and integrity of our system software very seriously and people should expect that hacked games won’t work indefinitely as regular updates to content, apps and our platform may break the hacks”. “Even if Revive wasn’t targeted, they were probably more than aware of the collateral damage“, he said.
The move is angering many fans with Vive headsets who were using Revive to buy and play Oculus games.
“If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want”, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said in a Reddit post a while back. “The software we create through Oculus Studios (using a mix of internal and external developers) are exclusive to the Oculus platform, not the Rift itself”.
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However, this is a far cry from the open, supportive tone Oculus offered the burgeoning VR community before it actually started competing with other platform.
