‘Oculus’ Doubles Down On Exclusivity Debate, In It For The Long Haul

“Oculus” has been receiving a lot of heat from the gaming community about its attitude towards VR exclusivity. The company wants to make as many of the games that it helped develop to only run on the “Oculus Rift,” but many are saying that this is bad for the market since interoperable hardware and diversification in software has been the key to the success of the PC industry. However, the Facebook-owned company is not about to yield its position on exclusivity and it is also willing to invest in VR game development for as long as it takes for the industry to attain profitable heights.

Speaking to Ars Technica, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe defended their move to maintain exclusivity among many VR games to their headset by saying that these games would not even exist or be as good as they are if the company did not invest in them.

"The developer normally wouldn't be able to go and make these titles as big and immersive and deep as we enable them to do," he said.

For example, “Edge of Nowhere” by “Insomniac” was only made possible because of the money and resources that “Oculus” funneled into the title. In exchange, the game is exclusive to the “Oculus Rift” in perpetuity.

Iribe did point out that the intellectual rights to the games still belong to the developers. So if they wanted to create another game such as a sequel, a prequel or a spin-off, they could.

On that note, Gamasutra also reported that as far as game development goes, “Oculus” is in it for the long haul. Anna Sweet, the head of developer relations for “Oculus,” confirmed that their aim is to jump-start the industry and they will invest until that is done.

"I think the way we think about it, and the reason we're investing in content and developers is we want them to be able to take those risks now while the market is still new and while we're all still getting hardware out into the world," she said.