Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey spent some time on Reddit yesterday addressing claims that the company is nudging the Oculus Rift toward becoming a "closed ecosystem" on the PC. As noted by Gamasutra, the complaints arose primarily from Oculus' funding of numerous Rift-exclusive games, including Insomniac's Edge of Nowhere.
Luckey said the Rift is a fully open platform, and that no approval or licensing is required in order to develop for it. The games Oculus is funding are being co-designed and co-developed by its own internal development teams, he explained, and most of them "would not even exist if we were not funding them."
"Making high quality VR content is hard enough to do when targeting a single headset, trying to support every single headset on the market with our own content is just not a priority for launch," he wrote. "Most companies would have done this as a 1st party software development effort, but we decided it would be better to work with existing developers who wanted to get past the bean counters and make sweet VR games."
Expanding on that point, he said that developing software for multiple types of VR headsets is a more complex process than most people realize, largely because of the proprietary SDKs involved. Because of that, the Oculus Rift store won't carry software developed for other platforms because it will have no way to ensure it will work properly. "When the software people purchase through us stops working, they don't care about the reason, they feel like they got screwed," Luckey wrote. "We can't build our business on workarounds that we have no insight or access into."
For more on Rift-exclusive games and other matters related to VR, check out our June interview with Oculus Vice President of Product Nate Mitchell.
