"That's it—we give up!"

A DRM update for the Oculus Rift has indirectly made piracy easier. Listen and you can hear the faces of Oculus employees hitting their palms as one.

Update 1.4 was supposed to protect Oculus exclusives from the likes of Revive, a hack that got Rift games running on OpenVR headsets, including the HTC Vive. Previously, Revive translated Oculus Runtime functions into OpenVR functions—Oculus' game ownership checks ran as normal.

However, Oculus' new 'platform integrity checks' look for a connected Rift before launching games. To get around that, the latest version of Revive has to bypass every ownership check. Currently it only works for Unreal Engine games, but Unity games are being worked on.

Before the security update, Revive let you play legitimately owned Oculus games on OpenVR platforms. Now you can play genuine and pirated Oculus games on OpenVR platforms. From the perspective of Revive dev LibreVR, it's not an ideal solution.

"I really didn't want to go down this path, but I feel there is no other way. This release bypasses the Oculus Platform DRM in Unreal Engine games, so the entitlement check doesn't fail because the headset isn't connected.

"I still do not support piracy—do not use this library for pirated copies."