Oculus Removes DRM Blocking Rift Games On Vive

In April the cyberworld rejoiced when cybergoggle enthusiasts created a tool to let HTC Vive cybernauts play games made for Oculus Rift. In May, er, Oculus responded by adding a DRM headset check that stopped software working if it wasn't on a Rift, despite Oculord Palmer Luckey previously saying sunny things like "our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware." Naturally, Revive quickly got around that. Well! Things seem to have come to a happy conclusion, as Oculus have quietly removed the checks. Vivers may once again play Riftzaps using Revive.

To explain in a grossly reductive way, Revive translates code written only for Oculus headsets to a language the Vive understands. It lets people use their Vivergoggles in games not built to support them. That's good!

"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," is the word today from Revive creators LibreVR. Their retaliatory workaround had been a bit burly, done in a way that would anti-piracy DRM in some games, and they seem glad to no longer need that. "As such I've reverted the DRM patch and removed all binaries from previous releases that contained the patch," they say.

It seems Oculus had a change of heart (or a change of thinking-this-was-a-sound-business-decision), as the company have told Ars Technica that they "will not use hardware checks as part of DRM on PC in the future." Which would hopefully spell the end of this particular mess.

So! If you have Vivergoggles and want to play games made for the Oculus SDK, you can download Revive over here.