Oculus readies update to kill HTC Vive cross-play hack

Lucky's Tale

Remember the homebrew tweak that popped up late last week allowing HTC Vive owners to play Oculus Rift games? The bad news is that Oculus has come out and called it a hack, and announced that it's living on borrowed time.

Ars Technica first spotted the LibreVR plugin called Revive, which acts as a compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK and OpenVR to allow Rift games to run on HTC's headset, and the site was contacted by Oculus and informed that the plugin will be shut down.

Oculus said: "This is a hack, and we don't condone it. Users should expect that hacked games won't work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to break hacked software."

Freebie fun

Obviously that's disappointing news for those who benefited from it, but it's hardly surprising. The plugin requires an EXE patch to work (also Oculus runtimes have to be left running in the background), and the maker has provided instructions on getting Lucky's Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck to run with the Vive.

However, because these are free launch titles for the Oculus Rift, it was unlikely that Oculus was going to let this workaround stand.

All that said, the maker of the plugin says he plans on continuing to support it, and he believes Oculus doesn't intend to come after him personally.

Note that while it still works for the time being, the tweak only runs on Windows 8 and Windows 10, although support for Windows 7 is (or was) planned. You'll also need an Xbox controller to play the aforementioned pair of Oculus Rift games on the HTC Vive.

Of course, when it comes to HTC Vive (SteamVR) games, some of those are playable on the Oculus Rift, and there's been plenty of consternation about the fact that the reverse isn't true.

Via: Softpedia

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).