Oculus Rift users got a little surprise if they recently updated their software. Oculus released a new update that quietly removed any barriers to playing Rift games on the HTC Vive.
This is in direct opposition to the company's previous stance about allowing its games to be played on other headsets, which is probably why there wasn't a huge announcement about the update's release.
When the Oculus Rift came out, players quickly realized that they could use a mod called Revive that allowed them to play Rift games on the Vive. Oculus wasn't very pleased about that and called Revive a "hack" and released patch v1.4, which has a check system that lets the game determine what headset a player has on. This came after the company said on a Reddit Q&A that it didn't care on which headsets gamers played Rift titles.
That patch, though, opened up the Rift to a completely different kind of illegal activity: it actually allowed players to use pirated versions of Rift games on the headset.
"The original version of Revive simply took functions from the Oculus Runtime and translated them to OpenVR calls ..." Revive creator Libre VR said to Motherboard. "The new version of Revive now uses the same injection technique to bypass Oculus' ownership check altogether. By disabling the ownership check the game can no longer determine whether you legitimately own the game."
Now, it seems that Oculus has fixed that patch by giving up altogether and allowing players to choose on which headset they play Rift games.
"I've only just tested this and I'm still in disbelief, but it looks like Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus Runtime 1.5," an update from Revive states. "As such I've reverted the DRM patch and removed all binaries from previous releases that contained the patch."
The notes for the Oculus patch, though, don't mention this change of heart, although Polygon reached out to the company, which confirmed that this is indeed the case and that the company won't use any more hardware checks as part of DRM ever again. However, the company stressed that it still wants to keep its hardware secure and believes that "protecting developer content is critical to the long-term success of the VR industry."
Oculus continues to face criticism, not just for this issue, but also for its botched launch, which saw some shipments of preorders delayed by months.
