Oculus VR has insisted that Oculus Rift “will be an open platform” without any kind of “console tactics”.
Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR founder, has dismissed concerns that the Oculus rift will be designed as a closed, walled-garden ecosystem.
A Reddit thread appeared recently that attempted to dissuade consumers from buying the consumer version of the Oculus Rift.
Their grounds? Apparently the two-dozen or so announced Oculus Rift exclusive titles are a sign that the headset is about to employ “console tactics” and lock players to a single platform.
“The Rift is an open platform, not a closed one,” explained Luckey. “You don’t need any kind of approval to make games for the Rift, and you can distribute those games wherever you want without paying us a penny.”
“We are not trying to lock the Oculus ecosystem to our own hardware, either – we already support Samsung’s GearVR headset, in addition to our own hardware.”
Related: Oculus Rift vs HTC Vive
Luckey also suggested that the games being backed by Oculus wouldn’t exist in any form if it wasn’t for the support from the company.
“What we are doing is working with external devs to make VR games,” explained Luckey. “These are games that have been 100 per cent funded by Oculus from the start, co-designed and co-developed by our own internal game dev teams.”
“The majority of these games would not even exist were we not funding them, itis not like we just paid for exclusivity on existing games – making high quality VR content is hard enough to do when targeting a single headset, trying to support every single headset on the market with our own content is just not a priority for launch.”
“Most companies would have done this as a first party software development effort, but we decided it would be better to work with existing developers who wanted to get past the bean counters and make sweet VR games.”
The consumer version of the Oculus Rift is due out in the first half of 2016. No pricing or a more specific launch date have yet been announced.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.