Palmer Luckey, the young inventor who created the Oculus headset, is now pledging money to a project that allows users to play Oculus-exclusive games on competing products. This week, the developer behind Revive — code that allows games to be played on the HTC Vive headset — revealed that Luckey was putting $2,000 a month toward the project.
On Patreon, developer Jules Blok announced that “the sudden extreme jump in the pledge amount is indeed by Palmer Luckey. I’d like to thank him for his pledge and everything he has done for the VR community as a whole.” With his $2,000 pledge, the Revive project is now making $2,008 a month.
Luckey has long criticized DRM measures that lock otherwise compatible games into certain headsets. On Reddit in December 2015, he wrote, “If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want. As I have said a million times (and counter to the current circlejerk), our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware.” Last June, Oculus removed the DRM that Revive bypassed from its exclusive games.
But the move might also be viewed as a little petty, in light of the co-founder’s unceremonious exit from the company, mothballed by Facebook after news broke that he had pledged money to an anti-Clinton political-action committee.
