Morally murky in virtual reality

MAY 23RD, 2016 — POST 140

Oculus have an exclusivity problem. Since the launch of the Oculus Rift almost simultaneous with the launch of Vive, a competing virtual reality headset by Valve and HTC, the community has been bypassing the pro ported “exclusivity” of Oculus’ titles to make them work on the Vive. Games and experiences that Oculus paid a bunch of money to secure only for their system were, apparently quite trivially, able to be bought by users of the Vive system. (That word, “bought”, is bolded for a reason, it will become immediately important). Essentially, through a piece of software called Revive, Oculus-exclusive titles could be “tricked” to thinking that a Vive headset was an Oculus headset. This was the case until last week when Oculus started including new digital rights management (DRM) on the titles in their store. This was supposed to have the consequence of fatally sinking the Revive project. If you wanted to play Oculus titles, you would need an Oculus Rift.

Fast forward less than 24 hours and, as Motherboard reports, Revive is very much afloat. The Motherboard story makes reference to the lead developer of Revive, someone who identifies themselves as “Libre VR”. The exploit Libre found when attempting to revive Revive post-DRM involved, essentially, bypassing an ownership check. However, this has an even graver corollary effect. In bypassing an ownership check, Revive now has the capacity to facilitate a decision it wasn’t equipped to earlier: piracy. Libre says that, whilst it wasn’t their intention, Revive can now just be used to obtain Oculus titles for free. Within 24 hours, Oculus’ fix has only served to fucked themselves harder. It’s reported that Oculus will fight back with an update to close the exploit but this is shaping up to be a protracted conflict in which it’s hard seeing Oculus ultimately winning. As other industries have proven, you’ll never stop piracy, that cat was out of the bag years ago. Rather, you can minimise it by luring potential pirates to easy, affordable, and well-designed paid services.