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Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

258 points by T-A 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cma 10y ago
The worst part is Oculus sold customers on something more open than they delivered. Now if you buy from their store your purchases are locked to their headset, and if you ever buy anything else in the future. Oculus/Palmer said they didn't care if you modded their games to work on third party headsets, just they weren't going to provide support themselves; instead they went out and broke it intentionally. >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. https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_luckey_on_twitterfun_fact_nintendo_doesnt/cxr6rid https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_lucke... >As I already said in my first reply, I don't care if people mod their games as long as they are buying them. https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_luckey_on_twitterfun_fact_nintendo_doesnt/cxr935z https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_lucke... >Glad there are some sane people out there. [said to someone saying it was only an issue of support] https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4etddh/this_is_a_hack_and_we_dont_condone_it_oculus_on/d24srvs https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4etddh/this_is_a_hack...
- __david__ 10y ago
  Interestingly, he abruptly stopped posting on Reddit about a month ago [1]. I wonder if he lost some internal battle on this issue… [1] https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey
  - the_rosentotter 10y ago
    There was a weird feature about Oculus at Facebook some months ago, where it was sort of hinted between the lines that Luckey and Zuckerberg didn't get along all that well. They even had to photoshop to get them into the same picture. Found it: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/09/oculus-rift-mark-zuckerberg-cover-story-palmer-luckey http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/09/oculus-rift-mark-zuck...
    - bitmapbrother 10y ago
      I read the article and never got that impression. If anything, he was grateful to facebook for not only purchasing the company, but also believing in his vision.
      - ss248 10y ago
        It's not the case. Iribe just sold everyone out. He made 5 minute (like literally) decision all by himself. Everyone (Palmer, Carmack, Abrash) heard about Facebook acquisition after the deal was already set. It was already to late for them to do anything at that point. It might as well be, that everything they said after was just a part of facebook damage control operation.
        gnarbarian 10y ago
        I don't think Iribe had the latitude to do that at the time. From what I understand Palmer owned most of the company still at that point. He would have had to get signoff from at least a majority of owners before just doing it.
        ss248 10y ago
        "Palmer owned most of the company" Not really. Even before that whole kickstarter campaign he was just a founder. Roughly, the deal was: Palmer giving full power to Iribe, Iribe helping Palmer with investors/kickstarter.
- Retric 10y ago
  Only good thing about Facebook buying the Oculus was it's much easer to avoid buying...
jc4p 10y ago
I have an Oculus CV1, I had the DK2, and I've been making VR side-projects using their SDK for a couple years now. I'm really disillusioned about Oculus as a platform, though. I didn't even consider buying the HTC Vive because I've been riding the Oculus train for a while and had faith in them as the future of VR, but come on. I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this. Sidenote: for what it's worth, I haven't used my Oculus since the first week I received it. It was supposed to work with glasses (the DK2 does) by shipping with different foam faceplates that can change how far off my face it is (my glasses fit in the Oculus, it's just that the lenses are so close to my eyes that my glasses scratch them) but they silently took that off the "What's in the box" months before shipping.
- thearn4 10y ago
  > I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this. That's a really good point - has he spoken at all about the direction of Oculus & HMD VR in general since the Rift was released?
  - monk_e_boy 10y ago
    The champion of mods. The champion of being as open as you can (while making money.) He lectures, he helps, he's open and honest. I'm sure he is disappointed in where facebook+rift is heading.
- potatolicious 10y ago
  Ditto, I was one of the DK1 backers so got the CV1 for free. I haven't used it much past the first week - only to demo to friends and such, really. I have some disillusionment about it also - it seems like Valve VR/Vive is getting a lot more dev support. Having tried the Vive also, I think delaying the Oculus motion controllers was a critical error. It turns out the motion controllers really open up a lot of use cases, whereas a "simple" HMD-only feels particularly limiting in comparison. The Rift is substantially more comfortable than the Vive - the Vive I felt was extremely front-heavy to an extent it actively distracted from the experience. That said, the idea that Oculus Rift "works with glasses" is a statement that's at most 30% true. My glasses are pretty small but while the HMD is on it crams my glasses literally up against my eyeballs - my eyelashes literally brush against the lenses of my glasses while blinking. After using the Rift my glasses are covered with eyelash/eyelid/eyeball(?) smudge marks. It's tremendously annoying. The backing off of the "switchable glasses faceplate" promise is disappointing. And honestly, there just isn't much content. Most of the content are tech demos. Lucky's Tale is a really interesting vindication of the idea that platformers can work in VR - but it's also just not very compelling by itself. Ditto Eve Valkyrie - the technology is tremendous and you can't help but get that "Battlestar Galactica come to life" glee when you first launch in your fighter... But the gameplay is just not varied or deep enough to hold you for longer than a couple of hours. Between the discomfort of the HMD and the lack of content, there just isn't much motivation to dive back in.
some-guy 10y ago
Oculus / Vive / PSVR are all "consoles" in a way, and that as competition becomes more and more fierce, profitability on hardware will go down over time. By staying a closed platform, if Oculus can deliver on their hardware while selling software on their platform. What's different about consoles though is that, at least in Oculus and Vive's case, the software looks to be fairly compatible with one another (hack-blocking aside by Oculus). What I don't understand is, if it's trivial to run Oculus software on other hardware platforms with hacks, why wouldn't they want people to buy their software if it can run on other platforms as well? Is it brand protection? They can't make large margins on their headset forever.
- rocky1138 10y ago
  They're more peripherals than consoles. This is what makes it so frustrating to see what's happened to Oculus. Their recent moves are very anti-developer.
  - some-guy 10y ago
    That's what I mean -- they're trying to be consoles artificially. Vive has the Steam platform, Oculus has theirs.
    - nilkn 10y ago
      I think it's worth pointing out that Steam might technically be a walled garden, but it's a very open one, and it has full support for both the Vive and the Rift. I don't get the impression at all that the Vive is trying to be a console artificially. There is no content that is exclusive to the Vive only because of business contracts; the Vive is just enjoying temporary and coincidental exclusivity which is a result of Touch not being available and not even having a release date.
- onewaystreet 10y ago
  > They can't make large margins on their headset forever. They don't. Oculus is selling the Rift at cost. > Why wouldn't they want people to buy their software if it can run on other platforms as well? Their goal is to build a user base through exclusives. Exclusives aren't exclusive if you can play them on other hardware.
ohitsdom 10y ago
Really cool tech, but kind of a depressing start to this young industry. I feel like desktop apps are making huge strides in being cross-platform, both in attention from developers and the lower development effort required thanks to a myriad of software platforms and tools. It's just sad to see games still clinging to "exclusives" as if that's a positive thing.
- davesque 10y ago
  Well, when you get a big player like Facebook involved...
  - pekk 10y ago
    It's strange, though, because Facebook wasn't in the games business like this before, so they did have a choice of what approach they were going to take. There's no real reason they couldn't have come out swinging for open standards, for example.
    - davesque 10y ago
      True, although Facebook is still a massive company. At a certain point, it's extremely hard to keep the hard-nosed business types out of the game and they're going to have a more closed-minded approach to things.
- api 10y ago
  Today's Internet industry is all about vertical lock-in, app store lock-down, and surveillance (customer is product), so an "eyeball grab" and "platform grab" for VR is to be expected. This is particularly true when we're talking about a company where this is their entire business model.
- zanny 10y ago
  The natural progression of all software industries has always been to use proprietary first movers to dominate and control the market with DRM and lockin, burn it down, destroy all consumer and fan engagement, and then slowly flicker out where the corporate goliath that dominated first is eventually supplanted by an open community that should have been there in the first place, but everyone drank the koolaid. Be it web standards, OSes in general, word processing, graphics editing, CAD, 3d modeling, compilers, network protocols, graphics APIs, video game engines, and now VR. The only industry that I've seen even resist for a moment this tempting devil of profit has been 3d printing, which has been in many regards losing to "ease of use" DRM restricted proprietary tonka toys in recent years.
shmerl 10y ago
What a shame. Rift started as a crowdfunded open project and ended up as a disgusting lock-in. >Frequently secured through digital rights management (DRM ) technology, this functionality is typically standard for digital download stores. Not really. There are enough DRM-free ones. I don't care about games that are released through some exclusive DRM-infested stores, but what's more worrying is that hardware itself is probably tied to those stores. I.e. can you use Rift with games for example released through GOG? In this sense Vive isn't better now too, since it requires SteamVR (because no one else implemented OpenVR so far).
- errantspark 10y ago
  As far as I can tell none of the vendors are pursuing that sort of aggressive vendor lock. You can distribute binaries through whatever method you wish and have them work with either the Vive or Oculus. The DRM issues stem mostly from content released on the Oculus Platform. Your point about SteamVR and the Oculus Platform being roughly equivalent is true but I think about it in a similar context to drivers. Both platforms provide an API that you can build against, though personally I have been using SteamVR/OpenVR with both the Vive and the Oculus and I haven't touched the Oculus platform save a couple tests because building against OpenVR let's me use both the Oculus and the Vive. OSVR is the real shining light of hope in this ecosystem but as of now it just provides a layer on top of SteamVR/OpenVR/Oculus/etc requiring you to run those services in the background.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    > OSVR is the real shining light of hope in this ecosystem but as of now it just provides a layer on top of SteamVR/OpenVR/Oculus/etc requiring you to run those services in the background. Yes, unless someone will implement OpenVR and whatever Rift is using (OculusVR?) in a fashion that won't be tied to using either Steam or Oculus services, the hardware will be tied to them. And it still didn't happen yet. It's the reason I didn't buy either of them yet. I find such concept of hardware tied to a service to be completely bizarre.
istorical 10y ago
The discussion around Vive vs Rift and Valve vs Oculus is getting more and more emotionally clouded and "good guys vs bad guys" with each passing week. People are letting their own frustration around Oculus' poorly managed launch and non-existent PR affect their perspective on the situation. The fact is that although Oculus is adopting somewhat of a walled garden approach, people entirely overlook that Valve maintains a virtual monopoly on PC games distribution. Sure they aren't as powerful as iOS app store or the Google Play store, but Valve wants the same thing as any other player - to be in a position where you can't avoid selling your content through their channel and to take a big cut of all the sales. Those who attack Oculus for trying to be the one who gets the cut are deluding themselves. Apple, Google, Valve, they all already do this. Further, Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do? Just operate without any intention of ever making a profit? The PC gaming community online can be extremely toxic and idealistic, entirely ignoring business realities.
- NKCSS 10y ago
  But Valve does so by providing a good platform. You have Origin, which is used mostly because of exclusive titles; most people I know would love to ditch origin for Steam. Value also doesn't have the same approach as Occulus; where Occulus tries to be the iOS Appstore (others not allowed), Valve never had that approach.
  - AlexandrB 10y ago
    I would love to ditch both Origin and Valve for GoG which feels like everything I want out of digital distribution for games. GoG also has a more usable desktop app than Steam which suffers from a very overstuffed UI (not unlike iTunes). Although Steam unquestionably dominates AAA game distribution, GoG's selection is great for the kinds of games I'm most interested in these days.
  - zanny 10y ago
    Its not like you can get Half Life or DOTA2 outside Steam either (well, Half Life 2 is on the Play store. I guess everyone at some point bows to Ma Google). Every Valve game since HL2 has been Steam exclusive, and uses it for DRM. Since Valve self publishes their own games, can you really blame EA for wanting to do the same with their own DRM system?
bitmapbrother 10y ago
The winner will be decided by third party support. Oculus can continue with their DRM shenanigans, but in the end it's all going to be irrelevant. The third party developers will always exceed what Oculus or Vive put out in quality and quantity. And right now, according to Steam, Vive seems to have the majority of the third party developer support.
highCs 10y ago
Got a bunch of real questions: do you know if VR is growing? Does people like the experience? How long are the user sessions?
- dave2000 10y ago
  Hey, come on, 3D was huge and the glasses you have to wear for this don't make you look as silly and are totally not going to give you headaches or make you sick, plus there'll be even more content for this, and because of the standards you can just buy any hardware and choose from thousands of great, great games.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
errantspark 10y ago
Been working on VR side projects for 3 years now, I've built against the DK1, DK2, CV1 and the Vive and I have to say there's zero question in my mind that Oculus is FAR behind the curve. The Vive was love at first sight, the Oculus was quite the opposite. The Vive is stunning, not only because room-scale VR is fantastic. (I don't share the opinion that the future rests solely with room scale, there's plenty of stuff to do in VR sitting down) but also because Valve just seems to have it together more than Oculus. The Lighthouse system is brilliant, it's a much more elegant solution than what Oculus has. The Oculus platform is gross, I don't see any advantages to using it from the consumer side, as far as I can tell it only exists to lock people into a particular ecosystem. I understand why they did it, similarly to Origin or the Epic Games Launcher, but seriously? Steam won. I find it incredibly frustrating having to futz around with other platforms. Do they seriously think that I'm going to add all my Steam friends on the Oculus platform? That's ridiculous. I'm very doubtful that the platforms will get a userbase outside of the people who are FORCED to use them because they want a particular exclusive. To top it all off it takes 3 USB ports to run the Oculus (4 if you want the controllers) vs the Vive's one.
- paavokoya 10y ago
  >as far as I can tell it only exists to lock people into a particular ecosystem. sounds like a certain parent company..
- phoboslab 10y ago
  Valve's Lighthouse tracking system isn't particularly elegant from a usability standpoint. I see Oculus' and Valve's current systems as a temporary solution. The future likely is in inside out tracking (i.e. one or more cameras on the headset, looking out). Oculus is working on that. I'd be surprised if Valve isn't. I agree with your comments on the Oculus platform. It's sad to see them building higher and higher walls for their garden.
  - jc4p 10y ago
    Have you seen this demo of Jack McCauley's new laser based tracking? http://www.roadtovr.com/mts-virtual-reality-vr-tracking-system-jack-mccauley-oculus-vp-engineering/ http://www.roadtovr.com/mts-virtual-reality-vr-tracking-syst...
seanwilson 10y ago
I'm not a fan of lock-in at all but if Oculus don't make money selling the hardware and can't expect a high chance of sales from their store then how are they suppose to make money? Is their whole business model based on purchases from the Oculus store? Competition is good. I don't like how Oculus is trying to create their own locked in ecosystem but I don't like how some people only want to buy things from Steam either.
- nol13 10y ago
  Virtual ads, obv.
ben_jones 10y ago
As much as I'd like to see an "underdog" win the VR wars I think the Space race to market is a very small part of the battle. Facebook will be able to market non-gaming apps much better then gaming companies, imo, and so don't necessarily have to be first, just eventually get close to parity (which is inevitable).
bni 10y ago
Rift has two major advantages that made me choose it: 1. Doesn't require to hang stuff on walls, a single sensor beside the monitor is enough. For me dedicating a room to VR is out of the question. 2. It has built in headphones. Yes they look "cheap" on pictures, but when you actually use a VR headset that goes on and off a lot you appreciate the convenience. Sound is also VERY good in them. I don't get the blind Facebook hate and Steam fanboyism. Remember Steam is a 35% taking monopoly on PC gaming. If anything that monopoly needs to be dealt with.

258 points by T-A 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

cma 10y ago

The worst part is Oculus sold customers on something more open than they delivered. Now if you buy from their store your purchases are locked to their headset, and if you ever buy anything else in the future. Oculus/Palmer said they didn't care if you modded their games to work on third party headsets, just they weren't going to provide support themselves; instead they went out and broke it intentionally. >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. https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_luckey_on_twitterfun_fact_nintendo_doesnt/cxr6rid https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_lucke... >As I already said in my first reply, I don't care if people mod their games as long as they are buying them. https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_luckey_on_twitterfun_fact_nintendo_doesnt/cxr935z https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3vl7qe/palmer_lucke... >Glad there are some sane people out there. [said to someone saying it was only an issue of support] https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4etddh/this_is_a_hack_and_we_dont_condone_it_oculus_on/d24srvs https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4etddh/this_is_a_hack...

__david__ 10y ago
Interestingly, he abruptly stopped posting on Reddit about a month ago [1]. I wonder if he lost some internal battle on this issue… [1] https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey https://www.reddit.com/user/palmerluckey
- the_rosentotter 10y ago
  There was a weird feature about Oculus at Facebook some months ago, where it was sort of hinted between the lines that Luckey and Zuckerberg didn't get along all that well. They even had to photoshop to get them into the same picture. Found it: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/09/oculus-rift-mark-zuckerberg-cover-story-palmer-luckey http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/09/oculus-rift-mark-zuck...
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    I read the article and never got that impression. If anything, he was grateful to facebook for not only purchasing the company, but also believing in his vision.
    - ss248 10y ago
      It's not the case. Iribe just sold everyone out. He made 5 minute (like literally) decision all by himself. Everyone (Palmer, Carmack, Abrash) heard about Facebook acquisition after the deal was already set. It was already to late for them to do anything at that point. It might as well be, that everything they said after was just a part of facebook damage control operation.
      - gnarbarian 10y ago
        I don't think Iribe had the latitude to do that at the time. From what I understand Palmer owned most of the company still at that point. He would have had to get signoff from at least a majority of owners before just doing it.
        ss248 10y ago
        "Palmer owned most of the company" Not really. Even before that whole kickstarter campaign he was just a founder. Roughly, the deal was: Palmer giving full power to Iribe, Iribe helping Palmer with investors/kickstarter.
Retric 10y ago
Only good thing about Facebook buying the Oculus was it's much easer to avoid buying...

jc4p 10y ago

I have an Oculus CV1, I had the DK2, and I've been making VR side-projects using their SDK for a couple years now. I'm really disillusioned about Oculus as a platform, though. I didn't even consider buying the HTC Vive because I've been riding the Oculus train for a while and had faith in them as the future of VR, but come on. I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this. Sidenote: for what it's worth, I haven't used my Oculus since the first week I received it. It was supposed to work with glasses (the DK2 does) by shipping with different foam faceplates that can change how far off my face it is (my glasses fit in the Oculus, it's just that the lenses are so close to my eyes that my glasses scratch them) but they silently took that off the "What's in the box" months before shipping.

thearn4 10y ago
> I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this. That's a really good point - has he spoken at all about the direction of Oculus & HMD VR in general since the Rift was released?
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  The champion of mods. The champion of being as open as you can (while making money.) He lectures, he helps, he's open and honest. I'm sure he is disappointed in where facebook+rift is heading.
potatolicious 10y ago
Ditto, I was one of the DK1 backers so got the CV1 for free. I haven't used it much past the first week - only to demo to friends and such, really. I have some disillusionment about it also - it seems like Valve VR/Vive is getting a lot more dev support. Having tried the Vive also, I think delaying the Oculus motion controllers was a critical error. It turns out the motion controllers really open up a lot of use cases, whereas a "simple" HMD-only feels particularly limiting in comparison. The Rift is substantially more comfortable than the Vive - the Vive I felt was extremely front-heavy to an extent it actively distracted from the experience. That said, the idea that Oculus Rift "works with glasses" is a statement that's at most 30% true. My glasses are pretty small but while the HMD is on it crams my glasses literally up against my eyeballs - my eyelashes literally brush against the lenses of my glasses while blinking. After using the Rift my glasses are covered with eyelash/eyelid/eyeball(?) smudge marks. It's tremendously annoying. The backing off of the "switchable glasses faceplate" promise is disappointing. And honestly, there just isn't much content. Most of the content are tech demos. Lucky's Tale is a really interesting vindication of the idea that platformers can work in VR - but it's also just not very compelling by itself. Ditto Eve Valkyrie - the technology is tremendous and you can't help but get that "Battlestar Galactica come to life" glee when you first launch in your fighter... But the gameplay is just not varied or deep enough to hold you for longer than a couple of hours. Between the discomfort of the HMD and the lack of content, there just isn't much motivation to dive back in.

some-guy 10y ago

Oculus / Vive / PSVR are all "consoles" in a way, and that as competition becomes more and more fierce, profitability on hardware will go down over time. By staying a closed platform, if Oculus can deliver on their hardware while selling software on their platform. What's different about consoles though is that, at least in Oculus and Vive's case, the software looks to be fairly compatible with one another (hack-blocking aside by Oculus). What I don't understand is, if it's trivial to run Oculus software on other hardware platforms with hacks, why wouldn't they want people to buy their software if it can run on other platforms as well? Is it brand protection? They can't make large margins on their headset forever.

rocky1138 10y ago
They're more peripherals than consoles. This is what makes it so frustrating to see what's happened to Oculus. Their recent moves are very anti-developer.
- some-guy 10y ago
  That's what I mean -- they're trying to be consoles artificially. Vive has the Steam platform, Oculus has theirs.
  - nilkn 10y ago
    I think it's worth pointing out that Steam might technically be a walled garden, but it's a very open one, and it has full support for both the Vive and the Rift. I don't get the impression at all that the Vive is trying to be a console artificially. There is no content that is exclusive to the Vive only because of business contracts; the Vive is just enjoying temporary and coincidental exclusivity which is a result of Touch not being available and not even having a release date.
onewaystreet 10y ago
> They can't make large margins on their headset forever. They don't. Oculus is selling the Rift at cost. > Why wouldn't they want people to buy their software if it can run on other platforms as well? Their goal is to build a user base through exclusives. Exclusives aren't exclusive if you can play them on other hardware.

ohitsdom 10y ago

Really cool tech, but kind of a depressing start to this young industry. I feel like desktop apps are making huge strides in being cross-platform, both in attention from developers and the lower development effort required thanks to a myriad of software platforms and tools. It's just sad to see games still clinging to "exclusives" as if that's a positive thing.

davesque 10y ago
Well, when you get a big player like Facebook involved...
- pekk 10y ago
  It's strange, though, because Facebook wasn't in the games business like this before, so they did have a choice of what approach they were going to take. There's no real reason they couldn't have come out swinging for open standards, for example.
  - davesque 10y ago
    True, although Facebook is still a massive company. At a certain point, it's extremely hard to keep the hard-nosed business types out of the game and they're going to have a more closed-minded approach to things.
api 10y ago
Today's Internet industry is all about vertical lock-in, app store lock-down, and surveillance (customer is product), so an "eyeball grab" and "platform grab" for VR is to be expected. This is particularly true when we're talking about a company where this is their entire business model.
zanny 10y ago
The natural progression of all software industries has always been to use proprietary first movers to dominate and control the market with DRM and lockin, burn it down, destroy all consumer and fan engagement, and then slowly flicker out where the corporate goliath that dominated first is eventually supplanted by an open community that should have been there in the first place, but everyone drank the koolaid. Be it web standards, OSes in general, word processing, graphics editing, CAD, 3d modeling, compilers, network protocols, graphics APIs, video game engines, and now VR. The only industry that I've seen even resist for a moment this tempting devil of profit has been 3d printing, which has been in many regards losing to "ease of use" DRM restricted proprietary tonka toys in recent years.

shmerl 10y ago

What a shame. Rift started as a crowdfunded open project and ended up as a disgusting lock-in. >Frequently secured through digital rights management (DRM ) technology, this functionality is typically standard for digital download stores. Not really. There are enough DRM-free ones. I don't care about games that are released through some exclusive DRM-infested stores, but what's more worrying is that hardware itself is probably tied to those stores. I.e. can you use Rift with games for example released through GOG? In this sense Vive isn't better now too, since it requires SteamVR (because no one else implemented OpenVR so far).

errantspark 10y ago
As far as I can tell none of the vendors are pursuing that sort of aggressive vendor lock. You can distribute binaries through whatever method you wish and have them work with either the Vive or Oculus. The DRM issues stem mostly from content released on the Oculus Platform. Your point about SteamVR and the Oculus Platform being roughly equivalent is true but I think about it in a similar context to drivers. Both platforms provide an API that you can build against, though personally I have been using SteamVR/OpenVR with both the Vive and the Oculus and I haven't touched the Oculus platform save a couple tests because building against OpenVR let's me use both the Oculus and the Vive. OSVR is the real shining light of hope in this ecosystem but as of now it just provides a layer on top of SteamVR/OpenVR/Oculus/etc requiring you to run those services in the background.
- shmerl 10y ago
  > OSVR is the real shining light of hope in this ecosystem but as of now it just provides a layer on top of SteamVR/OpenVR/Oculus/etc requiring you to run those services in the background. Yes, unless someone will implement OpenVR and whatever Rift is using (OculusVR?) in a fashion that won't be tied to using either Steam or Oculus services, the hardware will be tied to them. And it still didn't happen yet. It's the reason I didn't buy either of them yet. I find such concept of hardware tied to a service to be completely bizarre.

istorical 10y ago

The discussion around Vive vs Rift and Valve vs Oculus is getting more and more emotionally clouded and "good guys vs bad guys" with each passing week. People are letting their own frustration around Oculus' poorly managed launch and non-existent PR affect their perspective on the situation. The fact is that although Oculus is adopting somewhat of a walled garden approach, people entirely overlook that Valve maintains a virtual monopoly on PC games distribution. Sure they aren't as powerful as iOS app store or the Google Play store, but Valve wants the same thing as any other player - to be in a position where you can't avoid selling your content through their channel and to take a big cut of all the sales. Those who attack Oculus for trying to be the one who gets the cut are deluding themselves. Apple, Google, Valve, they all already do this. Further, Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do? Just operate without any intention of ever making a profit? The PC gaming community online can be extremely toxic and idealistic, entirely ignoring business realities.

NKCSS 10y ago
But Valve does so by providing a good platform. You have Origin, which is used mostly because of exclusive titles; most people I know would love to ditch origin for Steam. Value also doesn't have the same approach as Occulus; where Occulus tries to be the iOS Appstore (others not allowed), Valve never had that approach.
- AlexandrB 10y ago
  I would love to ditch both Origin and Valve for GoG which feels like everything I want out of digital distribution for games. GoG also has a more usable desktop app than Steam which suffers from a very overstuffed UI (not unlike iTunes). Although Steam unquestionably dominates AAA game distribution, GoG's selection is great for the kinds of games I'm most interested in these days.
- zanny 10y ago
  Its not like you can get Half Life or DOTA2 outside Steam either (well, Half Life 2 is on the Play store. I guess everyone at some point bows to Ma Google). Every Valve game since HL2 has been Steam exclusive, and uses it for DRM. Since Valve self publishes their own games, can you really blame EA for wanting to do the same with their own DRM system?

bitmapbrother 10y ago

The winner will be decided by third party support. Oculus can continue with their DRM shenanigans, but in the end it's all going to be irrelevant. The third party developers will always exceed what Oculus or Vive put out in quality and quantity. And right now, according to Steam, Vive seems to have the majority of the third party developer support.

highCs 10y ago

Got a bunch of real questions: do you know if VR is growing? Does people like the experience? How long are the user sessions?

dave2000 10y ago
Hey, come on, 3D was huge and the glasses you have to wear for this don't make you look as silly and are totally not going to give you headaches or make you sick, plus there'll be even more content for this, and because of the standards you can just buy any hardware and choose from thousands of great, great games.
deleted 10y ago
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errantspark 10y ago

Been working on VR side projects for 3 years now, I've built against the DK1, DK2, CV1 and the Vive and I have to say there's zero question in my mind that Oculus is FAR behind the curve. The Vive was love at first sight, the Oculus was quite the opposite. The Vive is stunning, not only because room-scale VR is fantastic. (I don't share the opinion that the future rests solely with room scale, there's plenty of stuff to do in VR sitting down) but also because Valve just seems to have it together more than Oculus. The Lighthouse system is brilliant, it's a much more elegant solution than what Oculus has. The Oculus platform is gross, I don't see any advantages to using it from the consumer side, as far as I can tell it only exists to lock people into a particular ecosystem. I understand why they did it, similarly to Origin or the Epic Games Launcher, but seriously? Steam won. I find it incredibly frustrating having to futz around with other platforms. Do they seriously think that I'm going to add all my Steam friends on the Oculus platform? That's ridiculous. I'm very doubtful that the platforms will get a userbase outside of the people who are FORCED to use them because they want a particular exclusive. To top it all off it takes 3 USB ports to run the Oculus (4 if you want the controllers) vs the Vive's one.

paavokoya 10y ago
>as far as I can tell it only exists to lock people into a particular ecosystem. sounds like a certain parent company..
phoboslab 10y ago
Valve's Lighthouse tracking system isn't particularly elegant from a usability standpoint. I see Oculus' and Valve's current systems as a temporary solution. The future likely is in inside out tracking (i.e. one or more cameras on the headset, looking out). Oculus is working on that. I'd be surprised if Valve isn't. I agree with your comments on the Oculus platform. It's sad to see them building higher and higher walls for their garden.
- jc4p 10y ago
  Have you seen this demo of Jack McCauley's new laser based tracking? http://www.roadtovr.com/mts-virtual-reality-vr-tracking-system-jack-mccauley-oculus-vp-engineering/ http://www.roadtovr.com/mts-virtual-reality-vr-tracking-syst...

seanwilson 10y ago

I'm not a fan of lock-in at all but if Oculus don't make money selling the hardware and can't expect a high chance of sales from their store then how are they suppose to make money? Is their whole business model based on purchases from the Oculus store? Competition is good. I don't like how Oculus is trying to create their own locked in ecosystem but I don't like how some people only want to buy things from Steam either.

nol13 10y ago
Virtual ads, obv.

ben_jones 10y ago

As much as I'd like to see an "underdog" win the VR wars I think the Space race to market is a very small part of the battle. Facebook will be able to market non-gaming apps much better then gaming companies, imo, and so don't necessarily have to be first, just eventually get close to parity (which is inevitable).

bni 10y ago

Rift has two major advantages that made me choose it: 1. Doesn't require to hang stuff on walls, a single sensor beside the monitor is enough. For me dedicating a room to VR is out of the question. 2. It has built in headphones. Yes they look "cheap" on pictures, but when you actually use a VR headset that goes on and off a lot you appreciate the convenience. Sound is also VERY good in them. I don't get the blind Facebook hate and Steam fanboyism. Remember Steam is a 35% taking monopoly on PC gaming. If anything that monopoly needs to be dealt with.