back to article Revive revived: Oculus DRM push shattered as DIY devs strike back

The Oculus DRM system has been shattered, opening the door to modders and pirates. The Revive library was developed to allow Oculus games to be played on other virtual reality units and as a side-effect opened the doors for users to play pirate games. Specifically, Revive functions as a "compatibility layer" between Oculus' …

  1. Bronek Kozicki

    Pirates?

    Bloody hell, this has nothing to do with pirating games, and everything to do with allowing people to play the games they legally purchased. It is Oculus' own goal to couple the hardware recognition with game DRM!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Pirates?

      Or you know you could punish them by not buying their stuff or even better take that ridiculous VR birth control off your head and go outside and enjoy the real world.

    2. L05ER

      Re: Pirates?

      yes, but if they are honest about that... they have very little legal footing to go after users for breaking the system.

      interoperability is generally seen as a legitimate reason to break technological restrictions... but not piracy. their lawyers would have to be stupid to have not advised them to sell it as "anti-piracy".

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Pirates?

        >yes, but if they are honest about that...

        But their CEO is not honest and that has been common knowledge on the inter tubes for a long time now.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Didn't all this happen a week or three ago? Anyway, serves Oculus right...they got a bunch of people on board with promises of openness and then surprise DRM'd them. That is a silly thing to do to a bunch of programmers who have put time and effort into the ecosystem.

    1. Adam 1

      Given half those quotes come from a month old reddit thread, I suspect that you're right.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Pirate

        Arrr!! By my grandmother's lighthugging kinetic weapony!

        It's time-travelling Pirates from the Oculus Rift!

  3. Dr. Mouse

    It's war!

    Oculus told devs (and others) they would keep their platform open to other hardware. They then yanked that support.

    They have now entered a war. Neither side will "win", it will be a constant battle until one side backs down. As it is unlikely that homebrewers will back down (someone will pick up the gauntlet if one dev backs out), this will just cost Oculus a fortune. They will have to constantly develop new ways to lock things down.

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge
      Trollface

      Re: this will just cost Oculus a fortune

      Oh I do hope so :)

    2. Triggerfish

      Re: It's war!

      There's a quote on the reddit thread where someone says something along the lines of cracking the DRM has now become the Oculus Rift Metagame, and many will be looking to crack it just to be on the scoreboard.

  4. Monty Burns

    WTF? Slow!

    WTF? This story is over two weeks old, why have you only just picked up on it Reg?

    1. DainB Bronze badge

      Slow news day I suppose

      There already was an article on Reg about it on 24 May 2016.

  5. Justin Clift

    Download stats

    In case it's of interest, the download stats are here:

    GitHub Release Stats - LibreVR/Revive

    The last release (0.6) was about a month ago, and it's about 30k downloads. So, about 1k a day.

    Anyone have stats on the number of Rift headsets sold?

  6. homerjsimpson

    Without wishing to stir (much), does anybody think Microsoft could have influenced Oculus over this? It just seems crazy they did such a deterimental 180 over this issue.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      No. It's facebook.

      1. Geoffrey W
        Terminator

        But it only works with a windows PC which is by Microsoft so it just HAS to be Microsoft's fault. Its gotta be...oh yes...SLURP is up to its old tricks again...I can smell them...evil cannot disguise its presence...

        1. homerjsimpson

          Sorry, I thought Oculus were partnered with MS - so I'm totally guilty of assuming the above.

          1. Geoffrey W

            RE: "Sorry, I thought Oculus were partnered with MS"

            And thus a new myth and internet rumour is born...mythtake?

  7. Mahhn

    Spyware?

    Does the oculus still require being able to monitor everything you see with it? That and the low rez are the killers for me.

  8. Psymon

    I think this is a step too far

    At what point can we start calling out anti-competitive behaviour?

    It's just a gaming peripheral! This is like a joystick manufacturer trying to block competitors from working.

    If this were a case between Microsoft attempting to block Logitech, then there'd be almost no question, but because Oculus are mainstream darlings just like Apple, they can get away with anti-competition.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I think this is a step too far

      No they can't.

  9. Dadmin
    Coat

    If I were the facebooks...

    I'd be mighty Oculus Pissed!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I said this would happen....

    And you all voted me down.

    Now we can get back to proper, unchained gaming, hm?

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Luckey's past statements about openness of the platform were rendered null and void once Facebook acquired Oculus. This outcome was foretold by many people as soon as news broke about the acquisition.

    It's time to vote with your wallets, chaps. Don't buy the hardware and don't buy the games, no matter how much you want it. The only way that Zuckerberg learns from this mistake is by losing a ton of money.

  12. Aodhhan

    I'm not impressed by Oculus. The VR product is buggier than an candy bar on the ground.

    No. It's not acceptable to bypass DRM for operability. If it was, there wouldn't be any DRM, because nobody would use it.

    I think in the long run this will hurt Oculus. Many games which could be well suited for a VR environment may not happen because of this. Such as any games with a Hollywood movie as a base. Hollywood is a huge proponent of DRM.

    If Oculus' code is so poor. All the bugs, plus having to bypass DRM... what other problems are there. How secure is their code? What attack vectors are now available due to poor coding?

    No, it isn't a company trying to shut down competitors... wow, silliness. It's about poor coding and QA practices. If I pay for a product, I want it to work properly and not have to jimmy it's way around things to do it. I definitely don't want the coding to be so poor it may introduce or allow the introduction of vulnerabilities.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So how long before I play Oculus games on my Chinese Android phone (for free)?

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