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Epic’s Tim Sweeney strikes out against Oculus’ “closed platform”

Epic’s Tim Sweeney strikes out against Oculus’ “closed platform”

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has expressed further disappointment in Oculus’ “closed platform” for VR.

Sweeney, who has previously decried closed stores like Google Play and Apple, has now turned his sights to VR company Oculus for locking consumers away from certain headset features.

His concerns relate to Oculus’ new Quest headset, which is a standalone device rather than a headset accessory for an existing PC. The existing standalone Oculus Go currently only loads software from Facebook’s Oculus Store, making it harder for users who, for example, want to run apps they’d developed themselves.

Oculus has yet to clarify if those restrictions will affect the upcoming Quest device.

 

Oculus head of product Max Cohen told UploadVR: “It’s an existential crisis for us to make sure we get data handling right”

Oculus legal team privacy program lead Jenny Hall added: “Privacy is something that we need the entire community of think about, we can’t just fix it or think about it on our own.”

Sweeney, however, believes that the arguments for security and privacy are redundant when it comes to closed systems, and in fact only serves the largest companies who benefit from restricted consumer choice.

 

As head of one of the biggest firms in gaming, however, it’s hard to take Sweeney entirely at his pro-consumer word. Epic famously decided to skip Google Play when launching Fortnite on Android - and shifted the blame onto Google after a launcher issue made it easy to install malware through the battle royale.


Staff Writer

Natalie Clayton is an Edinburgh-based freelance writer and game developer. Besides PCGamesInsider and Pocketgamer.biz, she's written across the games media landscape and was named in the 2018 GamesIndustry.biz 100 Rising Star list.