Oculus Rift: "Exclusive Deals Help the Industry"

When you've got a technology as new and untested as VR, which while "out" is still very much a work in progress from a cultural point of view, it's not good for the growth of the infantile hardware for the biggest brains supporting it to be divided. Unfortunately, with three different VR producers--Valve, Vive, and of course grandpappy Oculus spearheading this revolution, clashes are inevitable.

And the lion's share of the anger is directed at grandpappy Oculus, as both Valve and Vive are rather miffed at the machine's habit of taking exclusive games, which, for such a small, niche crowd as the VR peeps, is perceived as both bad for the developers themselves (only being able to sell to a third of the market is rather limiting when it's already so small) and for the market as a whole.

But they have their opinions, and Oculus's own Head of Content Jason Rubin has his own: unsurprisingly, it's very different. Talking with GamesIndustry.biz, he argues that rather than damaging the community and market, their exclusive deals are actually helping. y

"The idea that we're not doing good for the industry I find completely failing. Smaller games, indie games that come to us half done - generally, we say to them, here's a much smaller amount of money just to get you to where you wanted to be, and in exchange, give us a short time in the store exclusive."

"There are other cases where we say, 'We think you could do a little better job,' or, 'You're not quite at the finish line,' here's cash. Don't do anything [exclusive with us]. In fact, as of today, there are games in the Steam store that we have put money into that are not in our store."

So, not only are their exclusivity deals 'temporary', they also fund games that you can't even play on the Oculus just to see the budding community grow even faster. He even doubled down by saying "first-party" Oculus games might ALSO be temporary exclusives, meaning they won't even keep their own games to themselves. Claims I find... a little hard to believe, but if he's lying it'll only be a matter of time before some slighted developer speaks out.

But if it is true? That'd be great to hear. I'm not a fan of VR or anything, but I want to see it succeed, and helping foster the small library of games is certainly a necessary step in that process. But... I'm not that optimistic. So. We'll just take this with a pinch of salt or three.