Oculus Rift developers without preliminary announcements removed DRM protection
Brendan Iribe, Oculus CEO
At the stage of creating virtual reality glasses Oculus Rift, the developers claimed that their device and ecosystem would be universal. About a month ago, the company's actions went against the words of its CEO, Lucky Palmer, who claimed that games purchased in the Oculus Store could be launched on any headset - at the end of May a new software update checked whether Oculus Rift was connected to a computer. blocked the work of special software Revive, a program that ensures compatibility of the Vive headset with Oculus games.
This step was a clear implementation of DRM protection, did not meet the promises given to consumers, and cut off its main competitor, the Vive product from HTC and Valve, from the Oculus gaming ecosystem. A squall of criticism awaited the developers. Oculus sustained it for a month and, as quietly as the DRM was implemented, it was removed.
"Innovation" was not announced anywhere, but according to the developer Revive - software that allows you to run Oculus games on HTC Vive - the DRM-lock was removed. Quote from the project's github page :
It was removed from the DRM in Oculus Runtime 1.5. As for the DRM
Even more surprising is a similar step after a week ago, in a conversation with Ars Technica at E3, Oculus fiercely defended the introduction of DRM.
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe commented on the introduction of DRM: “This step is aimed at protecting content developers and the platform itself” and “we have nothing against Oculus’s personal hack and Vive connection, but the LibreVR project, Revive, makes mass piracy”.
After the introduction of DRM protection, the developers of Revive released a patch to get around it. Apparently, the company decided that the reputational losses due to the use of DRM would be more significant than the possible benefits of cutting off “pirates on Vive” from Oculus exclusives.
Among other things, as Steam's experience shows, the development of a digital store as a distribution center for VR games will allow developers to earn at times more than the sales of the Oculus devices themselves can bring. In this light, based on the reaction of the community, the prompt and silent elimination of DRM without any announcements makes sense.