Oculus denies paying devs for full exclusivity on Rift
Earlier this week, the developer behind the Serious Sam game series revealed on Reddit that the Facebook-owned Oculus VR has been offering large sums of money to game studios to release their virtual reality titles exclusively for Oculus Rift. Now, Oculus has fired back with its own statement, denying that their offer to the Serious Sam team had any sort of exclusivity requirement.
Here’s the full statement from Oculus VR:
We regularly offer developers financial grants to help fund early development of new titles to accelerate development or expand the scope of the game. In some cases, we exchange funding in return for launching on the Oculus Store first, with the expectation that the game will go on to launch on other platforms. In the case of Croteam, at no time did we request that they stop development for other platforms, and we look forward to seeing Serious Sam be successful across the entire VR ecosystem.
What Oculus is describing in its statement is what is commonly referred to as a timed exclusive, where a game launches on one platform first before becoming available elsewhere later. This has become a fairly common practice in recent years with games like Rise of the Tomb Raider, which released first on Xbox One in November 2015, then on PC in January, and then will finally release on PlayStation 4 sometime by the end of the year.
Obviously, in the case of Rise of the Tomb Raider, PlayStation 4 users are not particularly happy about having to wait for the game for up to a year longer than Xbox One users, but compared to true exclusives, which release for one specific system only, a slightly longer wait is certainly preferable to the alternative.
Mario Kotlar, the Serious Sam dev who first claimed that Oculus had approached the studio for on exclusivity deal, has not commented on Oculus’ new statement.
Photo by college.library
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