Oculus appears to be reversing course on a previous decision to prevent competing headsets like the HTC Vive from playing Oculus games. As noted by the developers of Revive this morning, a new update to the Oculus software that started rolling out to users today has now removed the headset check. The Verge was also able to confirm the news with Oculus.
"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," the company said in a statement.
If you recall, back in April the folks at LibreVR released a little tool called Revive, billed as "proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK and OpenVR" that basically allowed Rift exclusives to be played on the Vive. Oculus took steps to break cross platform compatibility, only to have the move backfire on them, with Revive circumventing Oculus' DRM altogether and actually opening the door to playing pirated games.
Oculus' move to enforce hardware-centric exclusives in an open platform like the PC generated quite a bit of criticism from parts of the VR community, including Valve's boss Gabe Newell. It was specially baffling given a previous statement by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, saying that players could mod games in order to play them on "whatever they want" as long as they buy the games from Oculus' online store.
Oculus hasn't changed its stance on exclusivity but it's decided to let the modding community do their thing. Revive developers responded in kind by pushing an update that reverted the DRM circumvention and removing all binaries from previous releases that contained the patch.