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Comment by yohui | Hacker News Reader

Are you asking whether the Vive is tied to Steam (the game distribution platform), or tied to OpenVR?

Currently Steam is the only game store that supports the HTC Vive, but as Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has said: https://reddit.com/491hu4

And the leaked HTC Viveport demonstrates: https://www.vrfocus.com/2016/01/htc-viveport-store-is-option...

There is nothing stopping other stores from selling games for the HTC Vive.

As for OpenVR (or SteamVR, Valve's implementation of it), I'm not sure it makes sense to ask whether the Vive is tied to it. Is your graphics card "tied" to your graphics driver or its OpenGL implementation?

The current situation, as MrRadar said, is that games can support OpenVR and headsets can adopt OpenVR without seeking anyone's permission. Compare that to the situation with the other leading VR headset and make of it what you will.

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> There is nothing stopping other stores from selling games for the HTC Vive.

How can developers do that, if there is no actual open implementation of OpenVR? Do they need to implement that runtime every time from scratch? Valve's repo only providers headers for the API, but actual runtime is distributed with Steam only.

Or you are saying that OpenVR isn't needed for using Vive, and some alternative SDK / framework exists that everyone can use?

> Is your graphics card "tied" to your graphics driver or its OpenGL implementation?

If the only OpenGL implementation that exists is tied to some distributor, it means that hardware is tied to it as well (at least until some other implementation will show up). Do you expect developers implementing APIs like OpenGL or Vulkan from scratch every time they make games? Same thing here. It's wrong to expect developers to implement OpenVR if they don't want to be tied to some store.

> until some other implementation will show up

That's the situation, I think. Someone, perhaps OSVR since they have Valve's cooperation or maybe Valve themselves, will eventually take the next step.

But the point is that OpenVR has no ties to Steam, only Steam's implementation of it does. The fact that SteamVR is currently the only implementation is not a minor detail, but unlike the situation with the Oculus SDK there is a viable path forward for open source VR with OpenVR.

It's sort of like OpenGL if Mesa didn't exist yet: you wouldn't say the situation is no better than with DirectX.

See for example: http://www.roadtovr.com/making-valves-openvr-truly-inclusive...

The article may be a bit dated, since it was written July 2015, but I'm not sure anyone has written a more up-to-date summary.

The user will have to have steam running and steamvr installed.

The developers only link to the libopenvr_api library found on github and can distribute their game including this library on whatever store they like.

It's certainly not a good situation that the user still needs steam, but the games themselves can really be sold and distributed anywhere.

> It's certainly not a good situation that the user still needs steam, but the games themselves can really be sold and distributed anywhere.

Well, I don't think requiring user to have Steam equals not being tied to it. I.e. you can't release the game let's say on GOG, and require users to have Steam client to play it.

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