A popular reddit thread over the weekend has brought to the surface a long-roiling, behind-the-scenes debate about the future of the nascent virtual reality revival. The questions being debated get into what exactly it means for a head-mounted display to be an "open platform," and who, if anyone, will be able to set critical standards for cross-platform development across VR hardware.
In a sprawling thread started over the weekend in reddit's "PC Master Race" subreddit, user ngpropman pointed to news of Oculus funding roughly two dozen exclusive games for the Oculus Rift's launch as evidence that Oculus is using "console tactics" to push for a "closed ecosystem" for its Windows-based VR peripheral. The implication of the post seemed to be that Oculus is working to lock games away from compatibility with competing VR platforms and that Oculus might end up closing off the entire platform itself from unauthorized software, in the style of Apple's iOS App Store.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey answered that latter implied criticism quite directly in the thread. "The Rift is an open platform, not a closed one," he wrote bluntly. "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." That gels with statements Luckey made in the wake of Oculus' $2 billion acquisition by Facebook last year, when he said, "If anything, our hardware and software will get even more open, and Facebook is on board with that."
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