The HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift are similarly priced, similarly specced, and serve a similar purpose. One is in bed with Valve, gaining extra features, a different library, and extra compatibility with Steam. The other has been around a bit longer – even if it hasn’t been on shelves for this amount of time – and thus has more developer support. The two have different control setups and even exclusive titles, albeit temporary ones in most cases. The Vive and Oculus Rift have been compared to some of the biggest tech rivalries of our time, such as Nintendo and Sega or Sony and Microsoft, and it’s not hard to see why. With similar capabilities and legions of hardcore fans fighting for each one, the parallels are impossible to miss for anybody who is familiar with those rivalries. According to HTC’s Vice President, Raymond Pao, however, this is not the case.
On the tail end of a recent trip to the United States, Pao stopped in at the offices of Upload VR, for a quick interview. During that, he was asked point blank what he thought of the rivalry between the Vive and the Oculus Rift. According to Pao, Oculus is not the enemy. HTC is less interested in using Virtual Reality to pad out their own bottom line than they are in advancing the VR platform as a whole, according to Pao. While it’s easy to dismiss these claims as HTC being afraid to compete, they actually make sense; with the current state of VR, the hardware is simply not different enough to warrant a real rivalry. On top of that, there are programs meant to break down walls of exclusivity and even allow people to play PC VR games with a smartphone-based setup.
HTC shares this stance with its supposed competitor, and according to Pao, they usually have pretty positive relations at public meetings like conventions. The same goes for Sony. Pao said of the main competitors in the VR space, “We do talk with Oculus and we talk even more often with Sony,” He did not, however, indicate any sort of possibility of a collaboration in the future. While some may be eager to see a console market-style rivalry pop up in the VR space, that just isn’t how it is, at least for now.