Tim Sweeney: Oculus is treating games from Steam and Epic as 2nd class citizens | Hacker News Reader

Tim Sweeney: Oculus is treating games from Steam and Epic as 2nd class citizens

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32 pointsbelltaco12 comments

This is possibly a bigger threat to WebVR than anything else, a bit further down from the quoted thread (one of the Chrome WebVR devs):

> So that really screws over WebVR. :( Not quite as bad as the lockdown on GearVR, but I suspect 90% of users will never check that box.

https://twitter.com/Tojiro/status/714473569426640896

Meh, Oculus' thing is that they want to "do VR right". If that means they need to be gatekeepers like Apple (hey, it works for Apple...) then so be it.

Saavy users will be able to get around this in seconds. Unsaavy users will be protected from saying things like "this doesn't work on the copy of Bejeweled I downloaded 10 years ago from PopCap!"

> Oculus' thing is that they want to "do VR right".

If that were true, then they would not have shipped without VR controls. Having an XBox One controller be the standard baseline for VR is detrimental to the entire industry.

I'm really happy to see that Tim recognizes that Oculus and Android's "unknown sources" checkboxes prevent third party competition almost as much as a fully closed ecosystem does.

He's criticized Google, Microsoft, and Apple before for their continual walling in of their platforms.

Steam has a VR abstraction layer, and Oculus probably see that as a threat.

But isn't this the big hardware developer's dream? Make some popular hardware and then create an app store for it? Seems that way. Leap Motion (worst hardware on Earth, man) did that. And I guess making it a walled garden is just the next step, if your hardware is really popular.

This was probably a big part of why my Leap went back in it's box, and still sits in another box of crud most of the time. Rather than becoming a common piece of hardware that I could find supported by various software in my every day life, I'd have to specifically go looking for software in :their store: to use it.

Leap employee here. Have you tried the new Orion tracking software? It's like night and day, especially for VR.

I honestly haven't taken it out of the box since I moved a year ago. I'd have to look for it.

Though that doesn't address the point of my post. I'd be more inclined to use it if software through other stores (Windows Store, Steam) had Leap support built-in. Having a third-party store just for your hardware is off-putting.

Fair point. Right now most of the activity is taking place on our developer gallery (https://developer.leapmotion.com/gallery/), which is entirely free. But content distribution is definitely an issue. We have embedded Orion hardware that's being embedded into future HMDs, so I'd expect to see more in other stores once the input becomes standard (rather than a peripheral).

Honestly, the more I read about Oculus, the more I want to move over to the Vive.

It looks like the Vive is going to have much wider support for games, platforms, and possibilities for developers.

I'm super torn right now but to be honest, the way I'm approaching it is "I'll wait for Oculus to finally drive me off", so I guess I'll just need to see what happens over the fall and winter release windows.

Hopefully this blows up in their face by driving away developer mindshare.

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