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An update that at first prevented users from playing Oculus Rift games on the HTC Vive has instead made the process easier, and even led to the possibility of Oculus software piracy.
In April a workaround called Revive was released that allowed HTC Vive owners to play Oculus exclusive titles like Lucky’s Tale on HTC’s rival hardware. Oculus soon hinted that it would be addressing the loophole, and a recent patch appeared to do just that.
Oculus has claimed that its update was not specifically designed to curb Revive, although that – initially at least – was what it achieved.
"Our latest software update included several new features, bug fixes and security upgrades, including an update to our entitlement check that we added to curb piracy and protect games and apps that developers have worked so hard to make,” the company told Gamasutra.
This update wasn’t targeted at a specific hack. 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."
However, shortly after the patch was deployed, the creator of Revive revealed that Oculus’ changes had actually made the process of running unsigned software easier.
Speaking to Motherboard, Libre VR said that the first iteration of Revive took the Oculus Runtime and translated it to OpenVR, which is compatible with Vive and other headsets. Thanks to the Oculus patch, however, the new Revive is able to simply bypass Oculus’ security checks altogether, leaving the game unable to determine whether you legitimately own the game or not.
Which, of course, also opens the door to piracy. Libre VR insists that should they discover a way to re-implement Vive play without bypassing security, it will be implemented.
"This is my first success at bypassing the DRM, I really didn’t want to go down that path," Libre VR on Reddit. "I still do not support piracy, do not use this library for pirated copies."
