“Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus Runtime 1.5”

Re:“Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus ... by orclev on Friday June 24, 2016 @03:21PM (#11972646)

Well, they recognize a problem, the community and them just disagree on what the problem was. The community views the problem as exclusivity deals. Oculus/Facebook see the problem as bad PR causing them to miss out on exclusivity deals they'd like to make and ineffective DRM (to be clear it isn't the DRM that they view as the problem, but that it was apparently too easy to bypass the DRM). Oculus "fixed" the problem by removing the DRM check (which wasn't doing much anyway), which they're hoping will also clear up that little PR issue. Once people forget about all this and they build up their market dominance a bit more, they'll take another swing at exclusivity deals in the hope that they'll be big enough to force the developers they want into it despite the community backlash it will cause.

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Re:“Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus ... by zeta0134 on Friday June 24, 2016 @03:59PM (#11972951)

The thing that bugs me about the whole thing is, the headset check does nothing for the fundamental implementation of the exclusivity deal. If I buy it through the Oculus store, then Oculus still gets their cut. After that, it really doesn't matter which headset I play the game on. The deal was still a success. I gave them money, and even did it on the storefront they sold the game on. What's the big deal?

I still think exclusivity deals are a bit bogus to begin with, but I think a perfectly reasonable compromise is to be exclusive to a particular storefront, but not a particular device. If another device shows up with the right capabilities, and the community is willing to do the leg work to port my legitimately purchased game to it? Awesome! Rah rah community, you've just expanded my potential market considerably, for no effort on my part.

The only real advantage I can see for a developer to be exclusive to hardware at this point is to cut down on development costs in the first place. The hardware platforms are emerging, very different, and not always compatible, even if it seems like they would be on the surface. So I can understand the reservations against wanting to code for or support more than one complicated VR setup. But if anything, it's been shown that the VR community right now is chock full of enthusiasts and tech--savvy people who will happily take a stab at those sorts of complicated ports all on their own. I think it's important that they have the freedom to do just that.

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Re:“Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus ... by rincebrain on Friday June 24, 2016 @05:16PM (#11973535)

The entire reason for the exclusivity is to drive sales of their hardware.

If they need to sell 500 units of hardware or 5000 games to break even on a given investment, and selling that hardware also increases the odds that you'll purchase other exclusives from their store once you've sunk the cost, there's plenty of motivation to do it, even if you don't end up buying most of the exclusive games.

(Note that I am not weighing in on the ethics of this, just remarking that there is a legitimate business reason to do it.)

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Re:“Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus ... by ethbro on Friday June 24, 2016 @10:56PM (#11974979)

Or, essentially, PC gamers would rather not trade control and cash for simplicity like console games have.

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Re:“Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus ... by romanows on Friday June 24, 2016 @05:18PM (#11973552)

It's not just the storefront, Oculus sells headsets too. But even more than making money right now on software and hardware, they want to capture the emerging VR market, dominate it for years, and make even bigger profits when the market has grown up.

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