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Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has dismissed concerns that the Rift virtual reality headset will be designed as a closed ecosystem.
A Reddit thread attempting to dissuade readers from buying the upcoming consumer version of the VR device cited Oculus’ funding of two dozen Rift-exclusive titles as a sign that the headset would adopt ‘console tactics’ of locking players to a single platform.
Responding to the accusations, Luckey insisted: The Rift is an open platform, not a closed one.
You don’t need any kind of approval to make games for the Rift, and you can distribute those games wherever you want without paying us a penny.
We are not trying to lock the Oculus ecosystem to our own hardware, either – we already support Samsung’s GearVR headset, in addition to our own hardware.”
Directly referencing the games being backed by Oculus, which include Edge of Nowhere (pictured) from Ratchet and Clank and Sunset Overdrive developer Insomniac, Luckey suggested that the titles wouldn’t exist in any form if it weren’t for the support.
What we are doing is working with external devs to make VR games,” he explained.
These are games that have been 100% funded by Oculus from the start, co-designed and co-developed by our own internal game dev teams.
The majority of these games would not even exist were we not funding them, it is not like we just paid for exclusivity on existing games – making high quality VR content is hard enough to do when targeting a single headset, trying to support every single headset on the market with our own content is just not a priority for launch.
Most companies would have done this as a 1st party software development effort, but we decided it would be better to work with existing developers who wanted to get past the bean counters and make sweet VR games.”
The consumer version of the Oculus Rift headset is due out in the first half of 2016, following the release of multiple development kits over the last several years.
