Oculus Shuts Down App That Let Vive Users Play Rift Exclusives

In April, it was discovered that virtual reality games billed as Oculus Rift "exclusives" could in fact be played on the HTC Vive--a competing device. This was made possible through software called "Revive," and it was shown to allow the Rift -exclusive Lucky's Tale to run on Vive. But no longer.

As Gamasutra explains, Oculus recently updated the Oculus app to include, among a long list of other things, "platform integrity checks." Apparently, with the update applied, the Revive plug-in has been dealt a fatal blow.

"This is a hack, and we don't condone it," Oculus said in an earlier statement to GI.biz about Revive, which apparently worked by allowing games to bypass Oculus' code-signing checks.

In a new statement sent to Gamasutra, Oculus further explained the action it took ("this update wasn't targeted at a specific hack," it said) and offered a high-level overview of its security practices.

"Our latest software update included several new features, bug fixes, and security upgrades, including an update to our entitlement check that we added to curb piracy and protect games and apps that developers have worked so hard to make," the statement said. "This update wasn't targeted at a specific hack."

The statement goes on: "When we first learned about hacks that modify our software to interfere with the security, functionality, and integrity of the Oculus ecosystem, and allow games to run outside the scope of our QA, testing and support, we immediately notified the community that we will not be supporting or maintaining the long-term usability or quality of hacked software."

"We take the security, functionality and integrity of our system software very seriously and people should expect that hacked games won't work indefinitely as regular updates to content, apps and our platform may break the hacks."

The developer behind Revive has also spoken out--you can read their thoughts in this Motherboard interview.

As we reported earlier, Revive worked as a compatibility layer between Oculus SDK and OpenVR, the development platforms for the Rift and Vive respectively. If it worked as advertised, it meant that Oculus exclusive games could be played on the Vive.

"It works by reimplementing functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls," a Github description for it explained.

All of the Oculus Rift launch titles can be found right here, and you can check out more of our virtual reality coverage at the following links:

• Oculus Rift Review
• HTC Vive Review
• Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, and Vive Comparison: Prices, Specs, & Games