Oculus ditches controversial Rift headset DRM after triggering Internet uproar - olivermandiess

The war is o'er. The in conclusion bombs have all down. The soldiers have come back home, and we can all join hands in Wall Street and sing Kumbaya until our voices give out. Oculus has officially removed its ill-considered DRM delay from the Rift and preemptively brought this fight to a close.

More or less downpla: A few weeks past, Oculus quietly slipped in a DRM-check with only one purpose: Breaking a program called Quicken, which wrapped Rift games to work on the HTC Vive. Revivif survived—it merely bypassed the DRM—but the virtual realism community went into an uproar (us included) at this anti-consumer doings, especially given past statements from Palmer Luckey and Oculus's personal post-launch woes.

"I honourable wanted to run Chronos on the Vive" – basically everyone

And for at one time, an Internet riot evidently worked. Eye has turned course, and didn't tied make an proclamation. "I've exclusive just tried this and I'm still in disbelief" is how near people found out this morning—words that kicked hit the update notes for the a la mode version of Revive. "IT looks like Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus Runtime 1.5. Eastern Samoa such I've reverted the DRM patch and distant all binaries from previous releases that contained the patch."

"Please rent out me know that this secrete indeed kit and caboodle and that I'm non still asleep," the unknown developer behindhand Revive continued. Confirmations rolled in from various users and…that's that. No Thomas More DRM. Oculus later confirmed to us it will no yearner use hardware checks, with the following instruction:

"We continually revise our entitlement and opposing-piracy systems, and in the June update we've removed the check for Rift ironware from the entitlement check. We won't use hardware checks as part of DRM on Microcomputer in the future."

This is huge. It's not Eye endorsing the Vive Oregon necessarily embracing a more open VR community—Luckey was defending exclusive games to press just this hebdomad. There are and volition continue to atomic number 4 exclusives happening the Rift, and Oculus will keep pushing the Rift as a console-esque platform alternatively of a PC incidental. If you have a problem with that? Peradventur give your money to someone who isn't Oculus.

On the other hand, this is a huge gesture and Oculus deserves to be applauded for information technology. If not an official countenance of Quicken, information technology at least seems like a tacit acknowledgement that hey, peradventur starting a war with the nigh tech-savvy ten pct of VR users isn't a of import mind. Kudos to Eye for listening to the biotic community—both its own users and Vive users—and meeting them middle.