A new software update for the Oculus Rift VR headset that was supposed to “curb piracy and protect games and apps that developers have worked so hard to make” has actually had the opposite effect. Whoops.
The creator of the Revive hack, which had allowed HTC Vive owners to play Oculus-exclusive programs before Rift’s latest update, has now released a workaround which restores functionality to his code.
Revive’s creator, Libre VR, tells Motherboard that “the original version of Revive simply took functions from the Oculus Runtime and translated them to OpenVR calls...the new version of Revive now uses the same injection technique to bypass Oculus’ ownership check altogether. By disabling the ownership check the game can no longer determine whether you legitimately own the game.”
Libre VR later added on Reddit that “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.” He also told Motherboard that “if he finds a workaround that doesn’t need to disable the ownership check, he’ll implement it.”
Remember that as recently as December 2015 Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had said “If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want.” How time flies when you’ve got a competing product in the marketplace.