Image above: Ben Kuchera/Polygon
It’s common knowledge that the HTC Vive is an open platform and the Oculus Rift is closed, with Facebook simmering in the background as a malevolent force in virtual reality. At least according to the common narrative that’s repeated endlessly in article comments and virtual reality subreddits.
The reality is that each system is open in some ways and closed in others. There’s no easy “good” or “bad” guy in this situation, but players would clearly benefit if you could use both stores on both headsets. It’s just not a situation where Valve is saying yes but Oculus is saying no, at least not entirely.
It’s much more complicated, in fact. This is how cold wars begin.
THE HARDWARE DOESN’T MATTER
We have to change how we’re thinking of the current VR ecosystem. It’s not a question of competing hardware, it’s a question of competing stores. Once you shift how you look at VR as it exists today, everything comes into focus.
The two largest competing products right now aren’t the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Those are just the hardware we use to access the real products for both Facebook and Valve: the storefronts. The products that are competing are Oculus Home and Steam, and right now Rift hardware is compatible with both, while the Vive hardware is not.
So how does the Rift and Touch controllers work with your SteamVR games?
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Valve’s goal is to keep you in Steam, where it makes a reported 30 percent from every game sold. Compatibility allows them to keep you as a Steam customer; SteamVR actually performs a hardware check so developers can optimize their game for the Rift and Touch controllers and give the player the best version of the game for their hardware.
This means, in many cases, you don’t have to buy your VR games from Oculus Home at all once you’ve installed the software to enable SteamVR compatibility. Oculus loses!
Consider the strange case of Arcade Saga, the first game from HTC’s first-party studio. VR enthusiasts are overjoyed that, although HTC funded the game, it’s playable on both the Vive and the Rift, so it’s not an exclusive. But they’re missing the bigger picture: It’s absolutely an exclusive, because whichever hardware you’ll use to play it, you’re going to use Steam to buy it. And that’s what Valve cares about.
Oculus, or, more accurately, Facebook, is investing so heavily in exclusives because it wants you to use its platform to buy and play games. Oculus’ profitability is secondary at this point, which is why the company is funding some amazing VR games that wouldn’t exist otherwise. The important thing is that players use the software platform itself.
Which is likely why Oculus doesn’t care that much about SteamVR’s compatibility, even though on the surface it looks as if Valve is trying to keep players inside of Steam no matter what hardware they use. Once you have a Rift with Touch controllers, you have access to Oculus Home, and you’re likely going to play the free games and even buy some of the best exclusives. This expands Facebook’s reach in VR, while giving the player the option of where to buy their games. Oculus wins!
So let’s maybe calm down a bit about claiming Oculus and Facebook are completely closed systems that are hostile to the VR ecosystem. Let’s maybe, just maybe, give Oculus a bit of credit for its part in allowing SteamVR games to be played on the Rift.
This, of course, begs the question …
WHAT ABOUT OCULUS HOME ON THE VIVE?
“We want to natively support all hardware through the Oculus SDK, including optimizations like asynchronous timewarp,” Oculus founder Palmer Luckey wrote eight months ago on Reddit when asked about Vive compatibility. “That is the only way we can ensure an always-functional, high performance, high quality experience across our entire software stack, including Home, our own content, and all third party content. We can’t do that for any headset without cooperation from the manufacturer. We already support the first two high-quality VR headsets to hit the market (Gear VR and Rift), that list will continue to expand as time goes on.”
We asked Valve’s Joe Ludwig about Oculus’ insistence on using its SDK natively on other headsets, such as the Vive. Would Valve ever consider opening the Vive up to run that SDK natively?
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The Rift hardware can play OpenVR games you buy on Steam due to Oculus’ public runtime libraries. The entire compatibility issue depends on Oculus keeping both its hardware and software open enough to allow OpenVR games to access both.
Your Rift can’t run VR games purchased on Steam without Oculus’ software. If you have a Rift and some Steam games, uninstall Oculus Home, and try to launch your Steam games in VR. See what happens.
I wouldn’t call anything in terms of cross-platform compatibility “simple,” but in this case Valve wrote a wrapper for the Oculus software to get the Rift talking to OpenVR, and that’s a very different situation than the assumed reality of OpenVR being compatible with the Rift on its own.
My guess is that Oculus has a mechanism to shut this compatibility down by changing the terms of service on the software that OpenVR depends on to run. It would also likely be possible to add a hardware check to keep Steam out. Oculus has not done either. That seems pretty friendly to me, and runs counter to the common narrative that Oculus is hostile to compatibility.
So could we maybe take a break from “Valve is being open, but Oculus isn’t?” It’s not an accurate representation of what’s going on, which brings me to my next point.
THE VIVE ISN’T AS OPEN AS YOU THINK
HTC is spinning up its own first-party development studio to invest in VR, and some people are pointing out that the first game released from those efforts, Arcade Saga, supports both the Rift and Vive. So it’s not an exclusive!
It’s an exclusive, but to see that fact you have to stop thinking in terms of hardware. The HTC Vive is a joint project between Valve and HTC, and both companies make money when you buy a game via Steam or Viveport. Arcade Saga will cease to be an exclusive when they begin selling it on Oculus Home, and you can play it natively on your Rift. Remember what we said above; the Vive isn’t the product, the storefronts are.
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Source: Polygon