Oculus Founder Responds To Oculus Rift Exclusives Ported To HTC Vive

The other day we reported that thanks to the efforts of a developer, a tool was made that theoretically allowed pretty much any game developed for the Oculus Rift to be ported onto the HTC Vive. Since obviously exclusives are a way for companies to give them the edge over the competition, the unofficial porting pretty much destroys that.

Unsurprisingly Oculus founder Palmer Luckey isn’t too thrilled about it, and in a statement he provided to ArsTechnica, Luckey was quoted as saying, “This is a hack, and we don’t condone it. Users should expect that hacked games won’t work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to break hacked software.”

Interestingly enough Luckey’s statement seems to contradict what he had said a few months ago, where he seemed to be open to the idea of people modding their games to allow it to run on all kinds of hardware. “As I have said a million times (and counter to the current circlejerk), our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware – if it was, why in the world would we be supporting GearVR and talking with other headset makers?”

The developer of the tool has also responded by saying he understands what Luckey is trying to say. According to him, “They’re worried people may buy games expecting them to work on the HTC Vive and they may get disappointed. Especially if I can’t keep feature parity with the Oculus SDK, which is what the comment about future updates is about. This is exactly the reason why, for the first version of Revive, I chose to only actively support two games you could get for free in the Oculus Store. Since I don’t want people spending money only to find out that the game they want to play is not yet supported.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gadgets, Gaming
Tags: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Virtual Reality (VR)