If you have an HTC Vive and you’ve been curious to see what all the fuss is about with Oculus Rift games, there used to be a workaround called Revive that would allow Vive owners to play Rift exclusive apps. Well, Facebook has put an end to that with the latest 1.4 update to the Oculus Rift, which blocks apps from the Oculus Store from running on the HTC Vive. Well, modders have already worked out a fix for the Rift’s new DRM.
The news was originally posted over on the official Oculus forums, where the company noted that they made a couple of improvements to the system stability, performance and sensor tracking. They also added additional currency support for the Oculus Store and attempted to fix an AMD bug. Oh yeah, and they also blocked the Revive workaround from allowing HTC Vive owners from playing Rift games.
Gameranx pointed to some unflattering comments sprawled across Reddit as the news continues to spread and gamers are made aware that the Rift will not allow its apps to play nice on the Vive.
The Reddit thread links back to comments that Palmer Luckey made five months ago on the Oculus sub-Reddit, where he stated…
“If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want. 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 software we create through Oculus Studios (using a mix of internal and external developers) are exclusive to the Oculus platform, not the Rift itself.”
Between 1.4 and Luckey’s statements, Oculus had made it known that they would be blocking apps from working on the HTC Vive.
Back on April 15th reports had gone around following a statement that Oculus released to Ars Technica, where they had mentioned that they would be blocking Oculus apps from running on the HTC Vive, saying…
“[Revive] 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”
Well that’s exactly what happened with the newest 1.4 update for the Rift.
A lot of Oculus Rift owners were not happy at all. In fact, over on the official Oculus forum, one user named boober had an expletive-filled post aimed at Oculus because not only were the hacked apps blocked from running on the Vive, but he could no longer access the Oculus Store due to it constantly shutting down and restarting, making it unusable. Boober was banned for how he displayed his dissessnion.
One user named valentine1497 responded, writing…
“Wow i see oculus banning backers because they were let down by their new updates this is kinda phony [don’t] you think seeing all that is happening today i cancelled my rift and am going for HTC vive with no regret i have to say…my friend has a dk2 and its not working anymore boober had a point there Oculus home keeps shutting down and reopens for no reason so he installed 0.7 back and got old version of virtual desktop and everything work perfect now Oculus is hiding something here and instead of banning the guy they should have send him a free cv1 because he backed their product in the beginning instead of trying to school him anyway i saw a lot of post on the subject today and its really sad for Oculus.”
One of the staff replied by saying that they only banned boober for his expletives and not for his dissent, for if it were the latter he would have had to ban half the forum members.
Reddit user yakri seemed to sum up the situation best, writing in the thread…
