Hacker News Reader

Comment by faide | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the exclusivity outrage. It seems entirely fair to me for a platform holder to expect something in return for funding development of a game.

Consoles have had exclusives since time immemorial and no one seems to bat an eye when it happens. What makes this case special?

View on HN

VR headsets aren't platforms in their own right with their own operating systems like consoles are, they're hardware peripherals. It would be like a company refusing to launch their game unless it detected the "right" controller plugged in to the computer. All of the game's code is being executed by the PC itself--that's why a shim like this was almost instantly thrown up to allow Oculus Store games to be played on the Vive, all they needed to do was translate the I/O from the Vive to the protocol that the game was expecting from a Rift. It's along the same lines as x360ce, a wrapper that lets you use any gamepad you want with games that only have official support for Xbox Controllers.

There are real differences in the Rift/Vive systems right now in terms of what they're capable of (Vive has touch controllers, Rift won't get them until a few months down the road), but hardcoding a check into your DRM that makes sure that you're using the correctly branded headset is just asinine. There's no real differences between the headsets themselves that justify it, it's just artificially trying to cut out competition.

All other things being equal, hardware exclusivity is terrible for consumers. Oculus is free to do whatever they want, "fair" or not, and consumers are free to vote with their wallets in return.

I think people have been particularly vocal here because a) the exclusivity ship sailed for consoles decades ago while the VR market is fresh, b) because the market for 1st-gen VR is mostly early adopters who pay attention to these things and have strong opinions, and c) because Oculus have seemingly been saying one thing and doing another.

Exclusivity has been horrible for consumers in the console market. Speaking for myself, I'd like to put my foot down and say "No, you aren't going to pull the same crap here". I personally really want VR, which means I want it done right. I fear that if it starts off on the wrong foot, it won't get anywhere.

Many people have batted many eyes about that. Those people typically are big fans of PC gaming, which happens to be the audience that Oculus is targeting. So Oculus is targeting the demographic amongst gamers which is the most opposed to exclusives.

By the way, Valve is supplying quite a bit of funding to VR developers as well but is somehow managing to do it without requiring exclusivity. At the very least, Oculus could require store exclusivity but not hardware exclusivity.

Finally, just because one demographic has gotten used to it (console gamers) doesn't mean it's right. Many folks understand the dangers of exclusives, and they want to prevent that from creeping into PC gaming.

> but is somehow managing to do it without requiring exclusivity. At the very least, Oculus could require store exclusivity but not hardware exclusivity.

Their massive share of teh PC gaming market via steam gives them more freedom.

Their massive share is the result of many years of operating fairly, while navigating the dangerous waters of drm. Valve built a lot of trust, and they are capitalizing on it.

That is, they behaved like they this even when they were not kings of the market, so the reasoning behind this is more akin to company culture than it is to market strategy.

People have gotten used to it in the console market, but to PC gamers the idea of being locked out of games based on your hardware is new.

This just goes to show why it's important to take a stand now, before we internalise this new, worse state of affairs and stop being outraged.

This isn't "Halo is Exclusive to Xbox only". It's "Halo is exclusive to Samsung 4k Ultra HD TVs".

I'm not a huge fan of exclusives either, but (technical reasons aside) how is your example different?

It actually takes effort to port a game to a different system or OS. I'm not a fan of exclusives either, but at least sometimes there is a real reason (we did not code the PS4/PC/Mac/Linux/Wii/PowerPC/32bit version), but this is an entirely artificial and arbitrary restriction.

Edit: technical reasons aside, I guess there is no difference. But at least one excuse can fall back on semi-technical reasons... This sort of exclusivity is purely for marketing and contractual reasons. It actually requires more effort to make the game exclusive than it does to make it multi "platform".

They compare like for like, a display.

Oculus leadership have been adamantly vocal since the Kickstarter days that they would never inhibit interoperability with competing HMDs.

Because rift is not a freaking console. It is just a new way to display a game that is running on a PC.

It's hardly a peripheral though. VR games are incompatible with traditional displays, and the development requirements are quite a bit more strict (low latency, high framerate).

It's quite a stretch to say that VR is "just a new way to display a game," in my opinion.

It's an extremely complicated peripheral, but it's still a peripheral. It's a monitor with an intricate tracking system that allows it to tell the PC powering it its exact location and orientation within a limited area. Playing a VR game is nothing like playing a game on a 3D monitor, it feels like you've been transported to another dimension, but the hardware itself isn't doing anything to execute the game and is still "just" a peripheral like a keyboard, monitor, or gamepad. It's just being fed what it should display by the PC and feeding the PC back information about its location and orientation. That's why Oculus initially needed to put a hardware check into their DRM to block shims like this, there's no real technical reason you can't use one in place of the other once you translate its I/O.

Vr games work fine with traditional displays, I've seen plenty of screenshots on my traditional display. It isn't pleasant or immersive that WA, of course.

Some games purposely designed for both or originally designed for monitors and then ported to VR might be able to, but the vast majority of them are going to rely on the headset's position in real life to move the player character in the game. If it's developed for the Vive or Touch it'll also rely on motion controllers to interact with the game world. You could look at the game on the monitor, but you'd have no way to move or actually do anything in the game.

it's a display, there are outputs of location data to the computer but they don't come from the headset, they come from other peripherals.

if I then plug the display into my video card; then that makes it a head mounted monitor with drivers to output data specific to that display.

People complain about console exclusives all the time. It's kind of receded into the noise floor, but they're still there.

And it's entirely fair for me, and others, to be outraged at this tactic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com