Facebook is on the path to platform lock-in with Oculus Quest, and at this early stage of the market, it could have big ramifications for virtual reality.
Facebook is on the path to platform lock-in with Oculus Quest.
In case you are unfamiliar with the concept, “customer lock-in” is an economics idea that “makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.”
With the standalone Oculus Quest, Facebook is funding Oculus Studios projects for both Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift and enabling cross-buy between them. For people who own both an Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest, this means the same Facebook-funded title should be playable on either headset with a single purchase. Third-party studios not funded by Oculus can also opt into the feature should they so choose.
It makes sense strategically — the move is a good one short-term for people buying any of Facebook’s low-cost headsets. If you’re an Oculus Rift owner today, for example, and you’ve purchased Apex Construct you should find the game already waiting in your library when you buy a Quest. Great, right?
Short term? Sure.
Long-term? That’s a bit more complicated.
Valve Corporation’s Steam is the storefront of choice for millions of gamers with PCs. Valve is a privately owned company based in Bellevue, Washington and, in 2016, it partnered with HTC to invest in the launch of a VR headset that would encourage people to use Steam to purchase VR games.
Critically, owners of Facebook’s Oculus Rift headset (and Microsoft’s Windows VR devices) could also play games from Steam through a Valve-controlled software bridge. If you owned an HTC Vive you could buy games from either Valve or from HTC’s Viveport and play them on the headset. If you owned a Rift, you could buy and play games from Oculus, Steam, or HTC.
Essentially, Valve established Steam as the default place for people to buy VR games because that’s where they already bought their PC games. The only exceptions to this, generally speaking, are Rift owners who buy their content from Oculus because it is the default store. The bottom line? Oculus essentially made their store a walled garden for Rift while Valve made Steam a place for all PC VR headsets.
Facebook, meanwhile, paid for a number of exclusive games like Robo Recall and Lone Echo to be sold only via the Oculus Store. Games on the store only officially work for Facebook headsets. A hack called “Revive”, though, made it possible for some Vive owners to run Oculus-exclusive content they purchased from Facebook.
Things are changing in Facebook’s strategy after the departures of Oculus founders Brendan Iribe and Palmer Luckey.
