Oculus Stops Blocking Vive Users From Playing Exclusive Rift Games

While both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive came onto the scene at roughly the same time with a similar-ish design, both companies couldn’t be more different when it came to their philosophy on exclusives. Valve thinks it’s a bad idea, while Oculus thinks that this is natural course of things, which we suppose is true given that exclusives have long existed before VR gaming.

However it looks like Oculus might have had a change of heart. According to reports, it seems that Oculus has decided to stop blocking the Vive from running its exclusive games. Prior to this, the company had a hardware check feature in place that ensured that the game was running on the Oculus Rift, but reports are now saying that the hardware check is gone.

The company has confirmed this in a statement which reads, “We continually revise our entitlement and anti-piracy systems, and in the June update we’ve removed the check for Rift hardware from the entitlement check. We won’t use hardware checks as part of DRM on PC in the future.”

They add, “We believe protecting developer content is critical to the long-term success of the VR industry and we’ll continue taking steps in the future to ensure that VR developers can keep investing in ground-breaking new VR content.” Well, that was quick. However it should be noted that this doesn’t mean that Oculus is giving up on exclusive content, it’s just that they won’t make a big deal if you don’t want to play or use it on the Oculus Rift.

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