VR headsets on the PC are just another device like your keyboard, mouse and monitor. I haven't heard of an LG-monitor-exclusive game before, so why should it exist for VR?
It's different on consoles.
Firs there was DRM and now the insistence on exclusivity. For some reason Oculus seems to have forgotten their promise of an open ecosystem, and I hope it's not some Facebook influence Palmer is unable to fight against, and if that's case, I hope Carmack isn't getting pissed. Remember, John is the driving force behind GPL'ing all the engines/games at id software. It's reasonable to doubt any future GPL id software release since John left.
Between the Vive providing an arguably better experience (at a hefty price) and Oculus alienating PC gamers left and right, I have no idea what's going on in their management department. It looks like the wrong people got control.
I'm exclusively a PC gamer and I'd even argue that this is false. Exclusives are bad for the industry and bad for gamers in general. It doesn't matter which platform you can afford/desire.
Even PSVR might be coming to PC. Many Xbox games are coming to PC. The industry seems to be turning its back on exclusivity. What does Facebook do? "Naaaa, we can make exclusivity work."
When industry leaders are aborting a strategy, it isn't a good strategy. What Facebook is doing makes sense only 5 years ago.
I totally agree that for gamers it's a loss. Most skip games on that other platform, but some grudgingly buy an Xbox or Playstation just for one game.
Another very stupid tactic is making PC gamers wait like Rockstar does with GTA. This is especially bad given the history of the GTA games and them being PC first back in the day.
Don't they have both have very similar specs and hardware (ignoring input for now)? Also, the whole point of drivers/SDKs is to abstract hardware differences away so software can work on a variety of hardware. It doesn't strike me that they are so different the drivers/SDKs can't cope with the differences. Given Revive lets Vive users play Oculus locked down games and both the Oculus and Vive are supported on Steam it's clear their hardware differences isn't a huge deal.
Zuckerberg mentions the number in this stream, I think it was around 700 or so employees, but can't remember for sure: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/137176-watch-mark-zuckerberg...
Valve has some of the most valuable franchises (Dota 2, Team Fortress, Portal etc) around and are under-utilizing them, not to mention they operate the largest PC gaming distribution platform.
They can definitely set the terms of that kind of partnership.
Yeah, I'm playing the world's smallest violin for Facebook, of all companies. THEY ARE TOO SMALL!
In general I don't like exclusivity, but I don't downvote for a well-intended, thoughtful contribution. I do think you ignore the more obvious motivation of them wanting a larger cut of the price.
First, the success of VR is an existential risk for Oculus. This is not true for Valve; Valve just doesn't want to be left behind (at least at a business level, I have no doubt their engineering organization wants to continue to be the tech leader).
Second, they are very concerned about whether people have good VR experiences, because the well has been poisoned by people's memories of 90s VR, Cardboard, concerns about motion sickness, overhype, headsets looking dumb, etc.
Third, they're a fairly small organization, and they already have to support engagements with GPU vendors, OS, as well, as getting their hardware built and supported. Having to support other hardware on their platform (especially as there is a race to the bottom between HTC, Razer, etc) is a huge additional burden. They do have financial resources from Facebook, but you can't just throw money at an engineering org, you have to scale carefully.
So to make VR is successful, they have to make sure that people have good experiences, but they have a small team. Buying exclusives makes perfect sense for them: it's a way to leverage Facebook's financial resources, and since the titles are exclusive they can focus on making those titles work as well as possible on a SW/HW stack that they own.