‘Oculus’ Latest Anti-Piracy Measure Broken Within A Day

“Oculus” has had a hardline attitude towards piracy from the very beginning, with its latest digital rights management (DRM) update specifically intended to block pirates from making illegal copies of their games. However, within just 24 hours of the update’s release, it was bypassed. According to a BBC article, the person who just made the update obsolete is the developer of “Revive”, the software that allows games exclusive to “Oculus” to run on other virtual reality (VR) devices.

The DRM update by the Facebook-owned company was meant to ensure that “Oculus” games could only be used in their official devices and that only legitimate games can be played at that. Before the update, “Revive” was able to allow users of devices other than “Oculus Rift” to play their games, which is what prompted the DRM update in the first place.

Unfortunately for the company, this forced the developer of “Revive” to find a workaround which completely disabled the DRM recognition completely. So now, not only can owners of other VR devices play “Oculus” games, said games no longer need to be legitimately purchased. The developer of Revive recently wrote a post on Reddit regarding the issue.

“This is my first success at bypassing the DRM, I really didn't want to go down that path,” he wrote. “I still do not support piracy, do not use this library for pirated copies.”

Despite saying this, it is to be expected that pirates and those using pirated games will take advantage of the loophole created by “Revive.” The question now is how this development will affect the sales of “Oculus” games and devices.

According to a 2015 mid-year report made by Arxan Technologies, pirated games cost the video game industry as much as $74.1 billion in lost global revenue in 2014. A New Zoo analysis placed the total revenue of the global video game market in 2014 at $83.6 billion, which means that the industry lost nearly as much as it gained.