Sweeney: VR platforms must stay open, Oculus following “the wrong model”

Tim Sweeney has urged virtual reality platform holders to ensure their devices and marketplaces are open to other providers in order to avoid the same monopoly that affects a significant portion of the smartphone market.

Speaking to Glixel, the co-founder of Epic Games said he sees "a lot going on that's wrong" in other tech sectors, and points to Apple as a prime example. While he thinks its fine for the firm to be the only distributor of its hardware, he disagrees with their monopoly on distributing software and collecting in-app revenue.

His added that virtual reality pioneer Oculus seems to be operating in a similar way to Apple, adding that this is "the wrong model" for virtual reality and something Sweeney "argued passionately against".

"When you install the Oculus drivers, by default you can only use the Oculus store," he said. "You have to rummage through the menu and turn that off if you want to run Steam. Which everybody does. It's just alienating and sends the wrong message to developers. It's telling developers: 'You're on notice here. We're going to dominate this thing. And your freedom is going to expire at some point.' It's a terrible precedent to set."

Sweeney believes that ultimately the open platforms will win as they will have a better selection of software. He praised HTC Vive for being such a platform and noted that the device is currently outselling Oculus two-to-one around the world, a trend he expects to continue.

The Epic Games founder acknowledged that his firm is making a closed-platform game for Oculus in the form of Robo Recall, a title that stemmed from Unreal Engine's Bullet Train VR demo. However, he attributed this to the fact that the game is funded by Oculus and could never have been built on a budget based purely on sales.

"The Oculus store... is an awesome store [but] should run on all PC and VR devices," he said. "Oculus would do best if they tried to bring users into their store by supporting HTC Vive and Oculus Rift and any other PC hardware that comes out. I think if they don't do that, they're going to pretty quickly fail, because you're not going to want to buy a multiplayer game that you can't play with half of your VR friends."

Sweeney previously spoke out about the need for open virtual reality platforms during his keynote at the latest Steam Dev Day, saying: "It would be really tragic if we let the future metaverse, that binds all humanity together into shared online environments, were a closed platform controlled by a giant corporation.

"As always, they'd use it to spam you with advertising, they'd use it to gather information about your private life and sell it to the highest bidder, and they'd act as the universal intermediary between all users, content creators, and transactions, ensuring that everything has to be approved by them."

In March 2016, Sweeney also expressed concerns about Microsoft's plans for its Universal Windows Platform, accusing the firm of trying to take complete control of the PC ecosystem - a standpoint he reiterated over the following months.