Oculus DRM Update Torpedoes Revive Hack That Let HTC Vive Owners Play Rift Games

It looks as though the folks at Oculus aren’t too happy about the Revive hack that we told you about in mid-April that allows Rift-exclusive games like Lucky’s Tale and the Oculus Dreamdeck demo to run on competing hardware like the HTC Vive. Just five months ago, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey proclaimed, “If customers buy a game from us, I don't care if they mod it to run on whatever they want. Our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware.”

That was then, this is now. Oculus recently updated its DRM to check whether Rift hardware is actually connected to a PC whenever a game that was bought/downloaded from the Oculus store is played. This update comes courtesy of the Oculus App 1.4 update that rolled out yesterday. One of the changes noted in the release notes mentions:

• Bug fixes and security updates, including updates to platform integrity checks

It’s the “platform integrity checks” that Revive developer “Libre VR” says torpedoed his hack. But according to Libe VR, who was interview by Motherboard, this latest DRM check does nothing to stop piracy by those that already own Oculus hardware and goes on to state, “This clearly excludes anyone who bought the game, but didn't buy an Oculus Rift. Even if Revive wasn't targeted, they were probably more than aware of the collateral damage.”

For its part, Oculus isn’t sorry about any collateral damage that results from the 1.4 update. "We take the security, functionality and integrity of our system software very seriously and people should expect that hacked games won’t work indefinitely as regular updates to content, apps and our platform may break the hacks," said the company in a statement.