As PC-based virtual reality gets off the ground, Oculus has come under fire from some corners of the community for saddling certain Oculus Rift games with exclusivity deals, barring them from working on competing headsets like the HTC Vive. Detractors argue this unfairly limits the market for competing VR hardware and goes against the ethos of interoperable accessories and controllers that has traditionally been key to the PC hardware market.

Speaking to Ars at E3 this week, though, Oculus executives defended their continuing efforts to secure exclusives for the Rift and the technological measures meant to stop exclusivity-breaking workarounds like Revive.

The thrust of Oculus' argument for headset-exclusive software is that these exclusives are games that wouldn't exist (or wouldn't exist in quite as polished a form) if not for Oculus' often substantial funding investment. "The developer normally wouldn't be able to go and make these titles as big and immersive and deep as we enable them to do," Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe told Ars.

In exchange for Oculus paying the full development costs, Oculus Studios titles (such as Playful's Lucky's Tale and Insomniac's Edge of Nowhere) are exclusive to Oculus headsets in perpetuity. But Iribe notes that the outside studios making those games still own the intellectual property, "so they can take that IP to other platforms [for new games] in the future if they want."

That's separate from Oculus Publishing, which gives partial development grants to VR developers in exchange for a short, "launching on Oculus first" exclusivity window. "[Oculus Publishing] goes out and looks at 'How can we help the ecosystem?'" Iribe said. "'How can we help developers?' If a developer wants to add multiplayer but they don't have enough funding for it... If the developer wants to work on their game longer, what can we do to help them invest more into their games?"

For Oculus Publishing titles, "they can take it to other platforms [after an initial exclusivity period]," Iribe said. "In no way, shape, or form do we ever tell them to not work on other platforms."

Spread the wealth around

Virtual reality developers aren't forced to take Oculus up on any of these exclusivity deals, Iribe stressed. "Some developers say, 'No, I'm good, I don't need any additional funding." The ones that say yes to exclusivity "are developers wanting to invest more in content," he said.

Another way to look at it, though, is that developers are "turn[ing] down a shitton of money" if they refuse an Oculus exclusivity deal. That's how Serious Sam VR game and level designer Mario Kotlar described on Reddit CroTeam's decision not to take an Oculus grant (and timed Oculus exclusivity) for the upcoming game. CroTeam turned it down, he said, because "we believe that truly good games will sell by themselves and make profit in the long run regardless. And also because we hate exclusives as much as you do."

(CroTeam CTO Alan Ladavac later clarified that "Oculus did approach us with an offer to help fund the completion of Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope in exchange for launching first on the Oculus Store and keeping it time-limited exclusive. Their offer was to help us accelerate development of our game, with the expectation that it would eventually support all PC VR platforms. We looked at the offer and decided it wasn’t right for our team.")

Oculus obviously sees throwing around substantial sums of money for exclusives as a good way to differentiate its Rift headset. But the company also sees the move as good for the acceleration of the nascent VR market as a whole.

Oculus Head of Content Jason Rubin (perhaps best known as co-founder of Crash Bandicoot creator Naughty Dog) said he remembers the days when computer games were made in a weekend and sold in Ziploc baggies. He doesn't think virtual reality gaming can afford the three-decade process that led PC gaming from that niche point to budgets of tens of millions of dollars.

"We believe that by pushing large amounts of capital to talented developers to do what they would want to do if the ecosystem was bigger, that we would get better results which will make more compelling content," Rubin said. "That will bring consumers, and those consumers will then justify other developers jumping in and making bigger products, and we can kickstart what was a three or four decade process to take significantly less time. We believe that that is the right way to kickstart the VR ecosystem."

The technological battle

Tying VR software to one headset is more than a philosophical battle of business models and funding levels. It's also now a cat-and-mouse battle of technologies. That's thanks to Revive, a patch that let certain Rift titles sold on Oculus' platform work on the HTC Vive headset. That workaround stopped working when Oculus rolled out a recent runtime update. That in turn led to a further Revive update , which also breaks the DRM on Oculus games, potentially making piracy easier.

While obviously opposing piracy, Rubin told Ars that Oculus has no problem with these kinds of hacks at a root level. "If somebody has purchased content and they want to mod something to work on their PC and do whatever they want to do, nobody at Oculus has ever had a problem with that," he said. Oculus wouldn't even have any way of knowing of the existence of such personal mods, he argued.

The problem, Rubin said, comes with the wholesale distribution of a hack like Revive to the whole community, rather than to a few individuals. "[A personal hack] is a far cry difference from an institutional tool made and distributed to a mass number of people to [support other headsets], strip out DRM, strip out platform features and the like. For an individual to do that for themselves, that would be all right. Mass distribution is an entirely different situation."

As for Oculus' role in the tech battle, Iribe at first minimized it by simply noting that Oculus' frequent platform updates might "inadvertently break a hack." When pressed, he added that such updates are the company's way of "protecting developers' content and protecting the platform."

"We're making a big investment, a really huge investment in this [exclusive] content," Iribe said. "We want to make sure that people are buying the content that developers are spending so much time making, that we're spending so much money investing in."

And they also want people to buy Oculus headsets, no doubt. "Right now, at this stage, of course I want people to buy the Rift [over the competition]," Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told Ars in March. "Our goal is not to lock every piece of software to it, just like we have software that's on the Rift and on Gear VR, and I don't care which of those they buy it on."

But that may not always be the case. "We've optimized the experience for the Rift right now," Iribe told Ars. "There will be other hardware in the future on the Oculus platform, but right now we're focused on the Rift and we're focused on making sure that the content and the platform all deliver the best experience on the Rift."

Or, as Luckey put it in March, "eventually there's going to be a lot more headsets to support."