ILMxLAB: ‘Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge’ First Look Coming July 28th

And if Facebook cared about sales numbers instead of trying to dominate the VR market by becoming what Google has in the phone market and what Microsoft has in the PC space, they’d make it a point to support all the headsets they reasonably can so to have the widest outreach. Oculus headsets, just checking the Steam hardware results, are 44.86% of total headsets. This is gonna be skewed by the few that don’t use Facebooks store over Steam sure, but practically half the market is nothing to turn noses up to. And before anyone says something about being the hardware and software manufacturer, both Google make phones and Microsoft make computers, despite not being their absolute focus. I’ll concede that VR is a slightly different beast, but that doesn’t change that it’s the one that’s as all encompassing and compatible as possible that wins out in the end.

Ironically, if Facebook really wanted to fulfill on their “Dominate the new market” plan, exclusives and walled gardens are the exact opposite of what they should be doing. As anyone doing anything in VR are on Steam first and Oculus second, even if they have a Oculus headset, because the place with wider compatibility is where everybody else, the social side and the software support side, is going to congeal. Exclusives in this context are just obnoxious for everybody.
It’s how Android and Windows became what they are, NOT being tied to specific hardware and generally being open for end users to do virtually whatever.
Palmer Luckey, in the early years when Oculus the company still existed beyond a front for Facebook, said he wanted compatibility with other headsets eventually with specific vetting and quality control, which obviously went up to smoke once Facebook bought them.

You do realize basically, if not absolutely, all of the Oculus exclusives are either literally from Facebook or funded by Facebook. No reasonable person is going to complain about the former, but the latter can get a touch obnoxious when they jump in and suddenly make things exclusive.

And looking at how much trouble a lot fo VR-games on steam have with different headsets/controllers

This is PC, that comes with the territory. Plus with SteamVR’s controller remapping and other customization options, there’s likely a community fix for anything that goes horribly wrong anyway.

the rest is split among all the others

44.44% is split between the Vive, Index, and WMR headsets, with the last one only being 8.35% of the market. Even just supporting the original Vive and Index would be a massive influx of potential revenue with how many people there are with those headsets. Make it so you can only use Knuckles controllers for controller parity fine, but it should still be an option.

So Oculus is still a major player, and you can bet you’re ass that a lot of those users also have games on the Oculus Store.

Never said they weren’t a major player, but just like iOS devices are a minority that can skewed to look like a majority if you only look at hardware sales, because android devices are split between far more different makes and manufacturers, the Oculus store will always be #2 having to dump money into exclusives to stay relevant in a walled garden in the face of SteamVR. Software exclusives are never good for anybody, there’s a reason why there’s still an uproar over EGS that exists to this day.

Viveport

Literally who?
In all seriousness, I have a Vive and never touched it, have met plenty of people with Vives, and either all don’t use it either or genuinely have little to no idea it even exists or what it is. I have genuinely never met anyone who uses Viveport, or even thinks about it in any capacity aside from “That’s a thing that exists, right?”.
Heck, I genuinely don’t even know in its entirety what Viveport even is. It’s a storefront? A stand in for SteamVR? I don’t think most people could tell you either.

As I gather from an earlier interview with some Oculus head, if a company like Vive would really want to, they could support the OculusSDK and get certified for the Oculus Store, but that’s on the headset manufacturer, not on Facebook.

Do you mean the same Palmer Luckey interview I made reference to in the previous post? “We can’t do that for any headset without cooperation from the manufacturer.” would be the relevant quote from that, so in any event it requires effort from all parties yes, but it’s nothing but a good thing in the long run for everybody.
Which even with that, actions speak louder than words, and one major action tells you everything you need to know.

Revive.

If Facebook really wanted to, they could bring on the Revive dev to make all the SteamVR headsets natively possible with clean and properly integrated support, as he’s already done most of the effort. But no. You know what they do? Add DRM they drop only because they realized it was pointless. Valve in this situation would have hired the guy, if it wasn’t for Valve being the ones to do it themselves before anyone had to.
And if Facebook would like more money, that’s absolutely on Facebook in conjunction with those hardware manufacturers to make that happen, not hardware manufactures exclusively. They have the cash from the endless reserves from mass selling user data, they just choose not to.

In any event, hopefully OpenXR makes this entirely moot anyway. There was a scare in the early VR days that all games would be screwed out of hand controllers because the Rift came with a XB1 controller and the thought was all games would need to be held back by that, which didn’t happen. So I’m hopeful Facebook and Valve encourage backporting practically all software to OpenXR away from OpenVR and the Oculus SDK.