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Revive revived: Oculus DRM push shattered as DIY devs strike back
Homebrew movement counters update with gift to pirates
The Oculus DRM system has been shattered, opening the door to modders and pirates.
The Revive library was developed to allow Oculus games to be played on other virtual reality units and as a side-effect opened the doors for users to play pirate games.
Specifically, Revive functions as a "compatibility layer" between Oculus' software development kit and and OpenVR so that gamers can play Oculus-exclusive titles on the Valve and HTC Vive.
Oculus updated its digital rights management system Friday to shutter piracy and in doing so cut off Revive in what the company described as collateral damage.
Its bid to isolate its system from the rest of the virtual reality market has irked users, some of whom took to Reddit to praise the Revive developer for pushing out a DRM-busting update.
"I really didn't want to go down this path, but I feel there is no other way," developer CrossVR says of the need to bypass piracy protections to rescue Revive.
"I still do not support piracy, do not use this library for pirated copies."
The homebrew platform works with the popular Unreal engine and is expected to be updated to work with Unity.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had initially given a thumbs up to modding gamers saying he is fine for them to play Oculus titles on "whatever" platform they wish, despite that platform-exclusive games are consistently used as a hardware selling point.
Revive appears to be a step too far resulting in what may be a cat-and-mouse jailbreak-style movement as Revive developers work to get around a series of Oculus updates.
Gamers may have luck in downgrading Oculus runtimes to version 1.3 as a temporary fix. ®