Oculus hints at possible Vive software block

The workaround that lets Oculus Rift games run on HTC Vive may be in danger.

Yesterday it emerged that a third party program released on Github allows any Oculus Rift title to be played on the HTC Vive headset. The first release allows titles such as Lucky’s Tale and Dreamdeck to happily run on HTC’s headset.

Now it appears that Oculus could be planning on blocking the tech in a future update.

"This is a hack, and we don’t condone it,” Oculus told Games Industry. 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."

The exploit works by switching functions that run in Oculus Runtime into OpenVR, meaning they are free to run on any device. However, as Oculus’ tech is protected, games do need to be patched before they can make the jump.

In theory, however, this means that providing a patch is made available, any Oculus exclusive can be played on HTC Vive. And furthermore, as Vive offers additional functionality over Oculus, titles can in theory run even better on the rival headset.