Have you ever fiddled with a rip in your clothes and ended up making it loads bigger? I feel like Oculus can relate at the moment.
Revive is a tool that allows VR games for Oculus Rift to be played on HTC’s Vive headset. On May 22, Oculus released an update that introduced “platform integrity checks”.
Among other things, this update essentially closed the loophole that allows Revive to make Rift games work on the Vive. Case closed, right?
Wrong. Unfortunately, Revive’s developer has found a workaround that restores the original purpose of Revive, but also bypasses Oculus’ ownership check completely, allowing users to pirate its software. Oops.
The Revive creator (who goes by the name of Libre VR) wrote on Reddit:
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.
Libre VR also spoke to Motherboard to stress that he absolutely didn’t design Revive to pirate games – but people can definitely use it for that now, if they’re so inclined.
To be fair to him, he also pointed out that if he can find a way that allows Rift games to be played on Vive without bypassing ownership checks and inviting piracy, he will implement it.
According to Libre VR, he’d actually like to work together with Oculus to allow people to play games on both devices – but I’d imagine Oculus aren’t exactly thrilled with him at the moment.
For their part, Oculus explained that their update wasn’t specifically targeted at Revive:
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. This update wasn’t targeted at a specific hack.
So are we doomed to an endless cycle of updates and workarounds, or will a compromise eventually be reached? We’ll have to wait and see.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.