
Tim Sweeney: Oculus is treating games from Steam and Epic as 2nd class citizens - belltaco
https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/714478222260498432?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
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shazow
This is possibly a bigger threat to WebVR than anything else, a bit further
down from the quoted thread (one of the Chrome WebVR devs):

> So that really screws over WebVR. :( Not quite as bad as the lockdown on
> GearVR, but I suspect 90% of users will never check that box.

[https://twitter.com/Tojiro/status/714473569426640896](https://twitter.com/Tojiro/status/714473569426640896)

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jbob2000
Meh, Oculus' thing is that they want to "do VR right". If that means they need
to be gatekeepers like Apple (hey, it works for Apple...) then so be it.

Saavy users will be able to get around this in seconds. Unsaavy users will be
protected from saying things like "this doesn't work on the copy of Bejeweled
I downloaded 10 years ago from PopCap!"

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surye
> Oculus' thing is that they want to "do VR right".

If that were true, then they would not have shipped without VR controls.
Having an XBox One controller be the standard baseline for VR is detrimental
to the entire industry.

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ocdtrekkie
I'm really happy to see that Tim recognizes that Oculus and Android's "unknown
sources" checkboxes prevent third party competition almost as much as a fully
closed ecosystem does.

He's criticized Google, Microsoft, and Apple before for their continual
walling in of their platforms.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Steam has a VR abstraction layer, and Oculus probably see that as a threat.

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fapjacks
But isn't this the big hardware developer's dream? Make some popular hardware
and then create an app store for it? Seems that way. Leap Motion (worst
hardware on _Earth_ , man) did that. And I guess making it a walled garden is
just the next step, if your hardware is _really_ popular.

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ocdtrekkie
This was probably a big part of why my Leap went back in it's box, and still
sits in another box of crud most of the time. Rather than becoming a common
piece of hardware that I could find supported by various software in my every
day life, I'd have to specifically go looking for software in :their store: to
use it.

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leapmotion_alex
Leap employee here. Have you tried the new Orion tracking software? It's like
night and day, especially for VR.

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ocdtrekkie
I honestly haven't taken it out of the box since I moved a year ago. I'd have
to look for it.

Though that doesn't address the point of my post. I'd be more inclined to use
it if software through other stores (Windows Store, Steam) had Leap support
built-in. Having a third-party store just for your hardware is off-putting.

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leapmotion_alex
Fair point. Right now most of the activity is taking place on our developer
gallery
([https://developer.leapmotion.com/gallery/](https://developer.leapmotion.com/gallery/)),
which is entirely free. But content distribution is definitely an issue. We
have embedded Orion hardware that's being embedded into future HMDs, so I'd
expect to see more in other stores once the input becomes standard (rather
than a peripheral).

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abstractbeliefs
Honestly, the more I read about Oculus, the more I want to move over to the
Vive.

It looks like the Vive is going to have much wider support for games,
platforms, and possibilities for developers.

I'm super torn right now but to be honest, the way I'm approaching it is "I'll
wait for Oculus to finally drive me off", so I guess I'll just need to see
what happens over the fall and winter release windows.

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jbpetersen
Hopefully this blows up in their face by driving away developer mindshare.

