Whoops: Oculus Piracy Crackdown Makes it Even More Vulnerable?

Oculus on Friday released a platform update that aims to curb virtual reality piracy—but it may have done just the opposite.

Version 1.4 of the Oculus app comes with updated "integrity checks" to prevent piracy. But that broke support for Revive, an unofficial tool that let people play exclusive Oculus Rift games on rival headsets like the HTC Vive ($989.99 at Amazon) . Revive developers promptly created a workaround that leaves the Oculus platform even more vulnerable to piracy, it claims.

In a Reddit post, Revive acknowledges that Revive 0.5.2 "bypasses DRM."

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

As Motherboard explains, "the original version of Revive simply took functions from the Oculus Runtime and translated them to OpenVR calls, [but] the new version of Revive now uses the same injection technique to bypass Oculus' ownership check altogether, [so] the game can no longer determine whether you legitimately own the game."

Revive, from a Github user known as LibreVR, arrived in April.

"This is a hack, and we don't condone it," an Oculus spokesman told PCMag, adding that the company did not intentionally break Revive support. "Users should expect that hacked games won't work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to break hacked software."

An HTC spokeswoman declined PCMag's request for comment.

The move comes after Oculus founder Palmer Luckey took to Reddit in December to respond to claims that Oculus might lock its software platform—particularly to other headset owners.

"If customers buy a game from us, I don't care if they mod it to run on whatever they want," Luckey said at the time. "Our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware—if that was, why in the world would we be supporting Gear VR and talking with other headset makers? The software we create through Oculus Studios…are exclusive to the Oculus platform, not the Rift itself."

He also said that "We can only extend our SDK to work with other headsets if the manufacturer allows us to do so. It does not take very much imagination to come up with reasons why they might not be able or interested." But Valve and HTC denied that, according to Digital Trends.

Version 1.4 of the Oculus app launched on Friday, and also promises improvements to performance, system stability, and sensor tracking, as well as bug fixes, security updates, and support for more international currencies. Oculus also noted that this update may cause version 16.5.2 of the AMD driver to flicker on a computer screen. AMD is currently working on a fix, and those who encounter a problem should use the 16.5.1 driver.

"Please keep in mind that this update is automatic, but may take a few days to propagate to all users," the company said.

Editor's Note: This story was updated on May 24 with comment from Oculus and a response from HTC.