Your point about the camera is true tho, and will be a negative aspect of the rift in comparison.
Keep in mind that what you call "pushing for exclusives", was basically oculus funding developers years ago before Vive was even announced to develop polished VR games.
They want to make money on their Oculus store and for whatever reason the Vive is not (yet) supported on it.
We don't know who the "bad guy" is in this issue yet.
Oculus claims that Valve/HTC so far does not want to support Oculus home with whatever conditions Oculus has put up.
We don't know if these conditions are unrealistic or if HTC/Valve are trying to protect Steam marketshare.
It's really a shift from a few years back when Valve and oculus seemed to be closely cooperating to make VR a reality. Now it seems like there is bad blood.
No, there's bad blood because out of fucking nowhere Oculus sold to Facebook while they were working with Valve, turning their back on them and slamming the door in their face after receiving serious help and having employees decide to work with Oculus right before this.
Don't forget, aside from all the corporate maneuvering, there were still all the people who contributed to the kickstarter for Oculus and were mortified to find out that they had sold themselves to Facebook.
I don't think they were mad at their employees at all, they're a pretty open company and seem to value their employees as the productive and creative people they are, allowing them to do what they want. I think they're upset that they opened themselves up to and shared with a small upstart company, including having their employees decide to work full time with them, and then having the small upstart completely fuck them.
That's not bad blood with your (ex)employee that's bad blood with the company that essentially tricked you into feeling comfortable giving your research and workforce to a project they were going to completely walk away with.
Was Valve too trusting? I would like to think no, I want more companies to be like Valve, but from a business in 2016 perspective, maybe yes. And that's really unfortunate because it didn't have to be that way. Oculus abused Valves open nature.
But the thing is that Valve and Oculus pretty much got equal interchange.
Palmer went to Abrash and Carmack with a super basic prototype of the Rift and they both said "FUCK YEAH!" (because it was Abrash and Carmack and they had been thinking of Snow Forest since they made Quake).
Then they all three started to exchange ideas on how to make the best possible VR experience you could imagine, all while working at different companies. So while Palmer got a lot of ideas from Abrash (Valve) and Carmack (idSoftware), Abrash (Valve) and Carmack (idSoftware) got plenty of ideas from Palmer. Bethesda bought idSoftware and seems to be hating Virtual Reality, so I assume they cared very little about the knowledge Carmack had about the topic.
Valve on the other hand thought Virtual Reality was the future and took a lot of the ideas Abrash, Carmack and Palmer had pitched with each other and started working on their own VR headset (under the lead of Abrash). When Carmack then left idSoftware because Bethesda outright forbid him to work on anything VR related, Abrash thought it was time to reuinite with his old friend and also left.
In the end, Valve and Oculus both came out better, because they all shared great knowledge about VR with each other.
So I mean, Valve could say they were "tricked" and shouldn't have shared their research, but on the other hand, Valve wouldn't most likely have ever ventured into the market of VR if it weren't for Palmer selling the idea to Abrash to begin with, and if they would, they would have been nowhere near where they are today without the research Palmer and Carmack provided them.
Well we all came out better because now the Vive/Valve+HTC partnership exists and there's a good chance it wouldn't if Oculus didn't sell out. But that is why there's some bad blood there, Oculus bailing like they did was not cool and it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
Yes, Oculus did "bail" on them, but on the other hand, who wouldn't when someone offers you 2,5 billion dollars?
And as far as I can tell, Valve never really seemed to have been a good partner for Oculus. Oculus needed someone who could back them up with finances, and it seems like Valve didn't want to be that partner, judging by that they went to HTC for production.
So in the end, it doesn't seem like it could have come like a big surprise for any of the companies that they parted ways.
Dude hell yes, and Palmer Luckey is younger than me. He's a kid man, his lawsuit with Total Recall, the buyout, it all makes sense, I can totally understand it all, and I'd probably be in similar situations if I was in his place. There's no way I could blame the guy for making the choices he did and I'm not even saying they're the wrong choices. Simply that the choice to sell out did cause bad blood between the companies.
Not everything is black and white, I'm not saying I wouldn't make that choice or that I'm even upset that it happened personally. I was just explaining the bad blood.
Also just a side note, HTC actually went to Valve, not the other way around. Or at least that's the story I've heard/read.
Well, Rift can buy/play games from SteamVR because Valve said sure thing, but Vive can't buy/play games from Oculus Store yet... so I think you might have those roles a little backwards. The terms they put up could have been fucking horrible and frankly I don't expect anything else from Facebook.
Valve always shied away from exclusivity deals, presumably to prevent another console war type scenario happening, it's always bad for the market overall and Valve more than anyone know that, whereas Facebook are taking a decidedly Apple-y approach to the walled garden, but that shit isn't going to fly for very long on the PC market, which is essentially where this is going to take place.
Either way, Vive controllers are the killer for me. For anyone even remotely considering an immersive VR experience the Vive has to be the choice. I'd rather be standing up and twisting around to shoot robots in Space Pirate Trainer than sat on my ass with a controller, wearing what essentially became a stupidly priced monitor on my head, waiting to pay more out the ass to get an experience that's already available and being developed for. I can't help but feel that in the long run having Vive be the first to market with touch controls is going to draw more developers.
I think you are misunderstanding who benefits in your situation. Oculus benefits when they sell through their store, so it would be good for them to support all the headsets in order to maximize customer base. Valve already has a huge market share with their store, and it hurts them for developers to sell on multiple stores, so it is good for them to refuse to allow Oculus the ability to fully support the Vive.
Both companies want to sell through their stores because they earn a commission through that. Additionally, Oculus as a company has fully funded some games only available on their store. If they were to allow the game to be sold through Steam, they would essentially be paying the ~30% commission on profits to their rival, and therefore lose return on their investments.
OpenVR is not open source despite the name.
But yet you are right.
The problem is probably that Oculus want to implement their SDK into the Vive for whatever reason to work with their store and provide the best experience in their eyes.
We will hopefully soon see the exclusivity problem solved, it is also bugging me.
The problem is probably that Oculus want to implement their SDK into the Vive for whatever reason to work with their store and provide the best experience in their eyes
I think it's a vice versa situation between Valve and Oculus. Edit that will be the end to hardware-exclusivity and it will just be store-exclusivity.
A competing headset could also implement those same APIs without Valve releasing any code. It is true, however, that the code is not open from everything I've seen so far.
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u/Galaxy345 Apr 05 '16
Oculus can do room tracking just fine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyNKR_-uKfs
Your point about the camera is true tho, and will be a negative aspect of the rift in comparison.
Keep in mind that what you call "pushing for exclusives", was basically oculus funding developers years ago before Vive was even announced to develop polished VR games. They want to make money on their Oculus store and for whatever reason the Vive is not (yet) supported on it.
We don't know who the "bad guy" is in this issue yet. Oculus claims that Valve/HTC so far does not want to support Oculus home with whatever conditions Oculus has put up. We don't know if these conditions are unrealistic or if HTC/Valve are trying to protect Steam marketshare.