Oculus VR is funding about two dozen Rift-exclusive games

The problem isn't that they're trying to spur development for a young platform. That's a necessity, of course, and nobody's going to disagree with that.

The problem is that these different VR platforms haven't even been released yet and we're already seeing a troubling precedent of hardware-exclusive titles. I've said this before and I'll continue to say it: locking a game to a specific piece of hardware is absolutely never beneficial to gamers, nor is it ever beneficial to video gaming in general. It's a ridiculous tactic publishers use to ensure that they make a lot of money and their competitors make none, and often times the developers really don't have any say in the matter - they're given a choice between getting funding to make their game, but make it exclusive, or they're not getting funding and they probably aren't making the game as a result.

You can say what you want about this being a necessary evil to spur development for an arguably risky new technology, and a few weeks ago I might have agreed with you. However, after seeing the sheer quantity and variety of the VR games that appeared at E3, I'm significantly less concerned about that being a problem. From what I can tell, a fairly large number of developers are confident enough in the tech to dive right in to development, and there were some seriously cool games shown at E3. That being the case I simply don't believe this decision was made for the betterment of VR as a technology, it was made for the betterment of Oculus™ and more importantly, Microsoft™.

The thing is, one of my favorite things about being a PC gamer is not having to deal with all that exclusivity bullshit. A game is either released on PC or it isn't. Of course, as a PC gamer, I don't get the chance to play any of the exclusive games, rather than a PS4 or Xbone player who gets to play 50% of them (figuratively speaking). And that's just fine with me, because this is a predatory practice that I can't stand and I have no interest in supporting the companies who insist on keeping this bullshit around.

The reason I think this is funny is because now, we're apparently going to see a similar dynamic of exclusivity with the different VR hardware. And I still don't plan on touching that shit with a ten-foot pole. If Oculus wants their exclusive games, they can enjoy their exclusive users as well, and since Morpheus is unsurprisingly exclusive to PS4 (at least, I think it is) that won't be an option for me either. At this point I can only hope that HTC/Valve will promote openness and cross-functionality with their hardware, though with the two other flagship headsets being essentially exclusive to Microsoft and Sony respectively I'm not really sure what difference it'll make.

/r/Games Thread Parent Link - gamasutra.com