Platform exclusivity is good for VR, Palmer Luckey argues

Oculus boss Palmer Luckey has argued back against those who believe that platform exclusive VR games are damaging.

You see Sony investing in their content the same way,” Luckey told TechCrunch. They want to make things that take advantage of their features that they have in the best way possible. Over time, that’s how the VR industry is going to move forward. In the short?term and the long?term, it’s good.

The short?term pain that some people feel, and I totally understand, is I want to play this game and I’m not able to right now. The reality is, I can see where that’s painful for some people, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad for the VR industry, or that it’s fragmenting it, or in the long run, it’s not the right way for the ecosystem to work.”

Developers who have agreed to Oculus exclusivity for their games have been quite aggressively criticised. Valve boss Gabe Newell himself came out and openly criticised the practise last week.

The Oculus Studio stuff is going to remain exclusive to the Oculus store and platform,” Luckey continued. That’s not to say that you’ll never be able to play it on other hardware, but it very much is exclusive to the Oculus platform.

When you’re looking at some of these other things, where sometimes you have devs come to us and say, ‘Hey, we need help finishing our game,’ or ‘we want to make this game bigger and better,’ we ask if those guys launched on Oculus first if we’re going to help them fund that. We don’t ask them to stop developing for other platforms. We don’t tell them they can’t launch on other platforms. In those cases, they are going to be coming out on other platforms aside from Oculus in the future.”