HiGame

Ever since Oculus launched its Kickstarter, hopeful fans of VR technology have looked to the company to provide a cutting-edge gaming solution. Since then, we’ve seen a number of companies announce their own VR efforts, from the Vive (Valve and HTC) the Gear VR (Samsung and Oculus), Razr’s OSVR, the new StarVR, to Sony’s Project Morpheus, there’s currently a race on to see who can provide the best hardware for virtual reality gaming. Unfortunately, as a new reddit thread illustrates, that future may be considerably more fragmented than users would prefer.

Oculus CEO Palmer Lucky took to the PCMasterRace subreddit earlier this week to answer questions around Oculus‘ decision to fund the creation of roughly 24 games that highlight the capabilities of VR technology. Oculus is building more than just a headset — it’s planning to build an entire platform, including motion controllers. Users took to the subreddit to ask how much support Oculus would be offering for other headsets or devices, and what consumers can expect in terms of hardware support.



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Palmer notes that Oculus is not a closed platform, meaning the company does not require game developers to submit requests for approval to build titles for the Rift and does not collect a fee for adding Oculus support for games. At the same time, however, the company is investing in its own ecosystem, and it’s not prioritizing projects for other headsets. When asked if it would be easy to add such support, Lucky implied that it wasn’t, saying: “Extending VR support to multiple headsets is not as simple as a patch, it requires pretty deep integration into the code of the game, integration that the developers themselves have to spend a lot of time integrating and updating. This is especially true for games that rely on our SDK features like timewarp, direct mode, late latching, and layered compositor to get a good experience. We can’t possibly make any promises about support through external patches, and we won’t commit to supporting people who want to use our store to buy games for headsets that our store and software don’t currently support.”

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