The world of virtual reality can seem like an exciting place if you’re a gamer, especially with so many titles at your fingertips from both the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Not all games are compatible with both devices though, at least, not officially, but those who own an HTC Vive were at one point able to play Rift-exclusive titles thanks to a software called “Revive” that allowed the headset to basically port over and play the game titles. Later, Oculus started adding a DRM check to those games following an update to the headset and the software back in May, and just yesterday Oculus content boss Jason Rubin stated that he believes Rift exclusives to be a good thing for the VR industry. In an interesting turn of events, it would appear that Oculus has now removed the DRM check from its exclusive titles as part of the June update patch.
This detail was discovered by the creators of the Revive software and published in a post over on Github, only to later be confirmed by Oculus that the DRM check removal is intentional and that they won’t be using hardware checks as part of the DRM in the future. This essentially means that Vive owners can once again enjoy Rift titles on their HTC headsets.
Although it seems clear that Oculus still believes in the idea of exclusive titles and in protecting developer content as they have mentioned that they feel these things are an important part of the future of VR, it would appear that for now they are trying to open up content a little bit more to a wider audience, specifically those with Vive headsets who would quite likely be willing to buy Rift-exclusive games so long as they could use it in pairing with the Revive software. Having said that, the creators of the Revive software have noted that Revive is not yet compatible with Steam, so any of the games that you want to play which are exclusive to the Rift would have to be picked up from Oculus Home which you’ll need installed. If you have the Vive, you can find a set of detailed instructions on how to get everything working by jumping over to the head Github post from the Revive creators.