When it comes right down to it, the only difference between consoles this generation, from a broad perspective, are the exclusives. Games like Halo, Gears of War 4 and Dead Rising 4 are what convince people to buy an Xbox One. Same with Uncharted 4, The Last Guardian, and God of War for the PS4.
The same is true for VR, so when Oculus found out back in April that people had discovered way to play Rift-exclusive games on its competitor the HTC Vive using a third-party program, the company put a stop to it with an entitlement check.
The creator of the program, called Revive, responded, according to Polygon, by bypassing Oculus’s DRM entirely saying in the patch notes,
I really didn’t want to go down this path, but I feel there is no other way. This release bypasses the Oculus Platform DRM in Unreal Engine games, so the entitlement check doesn’t fail because the headset isn’t connected.
From there it looked like this was going to turn into a massive feud, but then a few days ago, Oculus quietly removed the check entirely. The update didn’t explicitly say the check was gone, but Oculus confirmed the removal to Polygon saying that the company is continually revising their policies to make sure developer content is always protected.
We continually revise our entitlement and anti-piracy systems, and in the June update, we’ve removed the check for Rift hardware from the entitlement check. We won’t use hardware checks as part of DRM on PC in the future…We believe protecting developer content is critical to the long-term success of the VR industry, and we’ll continue taking steps in the future to ensure that VR developers can keep investing in ground-breaking new VR content.
Revive’s creator also responded to the removal, saying that he was in disbelief and removed the DRM bypass from the program.
I’ve only just tested this and I’m still in disbelief, but it looks like Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus Runtime 1.5. As such I’ve reverted the DRM patch and removed all binaries from previous releases that contained the patch.
It’s unclear why Oculus decided to remove the check; but fans can now play Rift titles on the Vive with, perhaps not full approval, more begrudging approval if anything, from Oculus.