Oculus defends exclusives, launch, and DRM controversy

OREANDA-NEWS. June 24, 2016. Though relatively young, Oculus is no stranger to controversy. While the virtual reality company enjoyed a successful Kickstarter launch, raising over \\$2.4 million dollars through the crowdfunding site, it began to garner the ire of fans when it decided to become a part of Facebook back in 2014 in a deal that was estimated at \\$2 billion.

Adding fuel to the flame, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had to walk back several initial assertions. Contrary to Luckey's claims that console controllers weren't a good input for VR, going as far as to call them "pretty s***y," the Rift ended up shipping with an untracked Xbox controller. Contrary to claims that the Rift would be targeting the "ballpark" price of \\$350, the Rift launched for \\$599, which coincidentally treads on the founder's initial quote that "if something's even \\$600, it doesn't matter how good it is, how great of an experience it is, if [people] just can't afford it, then it really might as well not exist." Contrary to stating, "If customers buy a game from us, I don't care if they mod it to run on whatever they want," the company ended up limiting those liberties when a modder made it relatively painless to play Oculus Rift games on the HTC Vive. When you add in the fact that the company encountered an unexpected component shortage for the head-mounted display, which resulted in massive multi-month delays for pre-order purchasers, coupled with the fact that the company was pushing exclusive titles, this led to many outraged critics.

At E3 last week, we got a chance to catch up with Oculus' Anna Sweet to discuss many of these hot-button issues. In our interview with the company's head of developer strategy, Sweet gives her take on the Rift's launch, the company's counter-modding measures, potential Oculus Touch fragmentation issues, exclusivity concerns, and much more.