“Several” Oculus-Funded titles will feature Steam VR Support

“Several” Oculus-Funded titles will feature Steam VR Support

 

Palmer Luckey has confirmed that “Several” Oculus-Funded titles will feature Steam VR Support, meaning that they are not forcing Oculus developers into an “exclusivity” agreement that goes any further than requiring the game to be sold in their own Oculus Storefront. 

So called “Oculus Exclusive” applications or games can run on other VR hardware if the developer wishes, meaning that most of these “Oculus Exclusive” titles could potentially run on the HTC Vive headset. 

Palmer has already stated that Oculus is not making any money off their Rift Hardware, so making money from selling games applications on their own store, which is similar to how Steam operates, will give them a great opportunity to make some money while making their hardware as cheap as possible. 

 

        “There are several games we have funded that also integrate SteamVR support (I am not aware of any commercial software using OpenVR),”

 “We do require Oculus SDK integration for everything in our store, funded or not. We can’t rely on a (currently) lower-performance SDK that is controlled by a competitor, especially when they have shown that Oculus support is not a high priority – SteamVR support for DK2 is frequently broken, they are focusing on HTC’s Vive, which makes sense. We need every game in our store to always work for every customer, because at the end of the day, we are usually the ones stuck with the costs of supporting the customer.”

  

 

     When we say “Oculus Exclusive”, that means exclusive to the Oculus Store, not exclusive to the Rift. We don’t make money off the Rift hardware, and don’t really have an incentive to lock our software to Rift. That is why the Oculus Store is also on Samsung’s Gear VR. Gear VR and the Rift are the first consumer VR devices coming out, but in the future, I expect there will be a wide range of hardware at a variety of price and quality points, much like the television and phone markets.

  

Making VR only games is a very tricky proposition at this time, as nobody knows if the hardware ill really take off, so making a developer exclusive to a single VR platform and not only VR is a very tricky proposition. “Oculus Exclusive” games will no doubt be made with the Oculus Rift in mind, but it will leave the option open for developer to support other VR hardware like Gear VR and the HTC Vive, while still allowing Oculus to make money from the exclusivity on the Oculus store. 

 

      Currently, the only headsets that run content from the Oculus Store are Samsung’s GearVR and the Rift. If and when other headsets come out in the future, and if and when the companies making those headsets allow us to support them, you might see wider support, but we have to focus on launching our own products right now.

 

You can join the discussion on Oculus Funded games working on the Steam VR Headset on the OC3D Forums.