Oculus swears off the use of hardware checks as DRM on PC

Oculus VR eased up on its DRM policies this week by updating its software client so that it no longer checks to see if an Oculus Rift headset is connected to a player's PC before allowing them to launch a game.

By doing so the company seems to be walking back the decision it made last month to add "platform integrity" checks to the Oculus Home client, effectively putting the kibosh on a 'hack' that let Vive owners play Rift games.

Shortly thereafter, the developer of that 'hack' -- an unofficial plug-in called Revive -- updated it to circumvent those platform integrity checks, mournfully acknowledging that in the process Revive had become a better tool for pirating Rift games. 

Now, the developer of Revive tells Motherboard that since Oculus has updated its client to remove the headset check, he has reverted Revive to a previous version that didn't make piracy easier and has tried to scrub all the updated code from the Revive GitHub repo.

Oculus, for its part, has pledged to avoid using hardware verification checks in its anti-piracy and entitlement systems going forward.

"We won't use hardware checks as part of DRM on PC in the future," an Oculus representative told Motherboard when reached for comment. "We believe protecting developer content is critical to the long-term success of the VR industry, and we’ll continue taking steps in the future to ensure that VR developers can keep investing in ground-breaking new VR content."