Despite the industry as a whole rejecting the idea of exclusive virtual reality games, Gabe Newell himself saying it's a terrible practice and the VR community around the world all claiming that it's terrible and a parroting of the worst parts of console gaming, Oculus is still trumpeting the same line: VR exclusives are great for everyone.
"The average gamer is now aware of $100 million games," said Oculus head of content Jason Rubin. "And while we certainly cannot build a $100 million game that takes four years, in the year we've had dev kits, we can try to get closer to that by funding significant leaps beyond the financial certainty that a developer would need to have to do it on their own."
Essentially, Oculus doesn't want developers making non-VR games because it's a better financial option for those companies. So it's been investing money in games and wants them on the Oculus store so it has a solid library for new VR enthusiasts to enjoy.
"The better game gets to all consumers in that case. And those are the deals we're making. And that, to me, makes a lot more sense than just let this thing work itself out over a decade."
Except it doesn't come to "all consumers," as he claims, since it's hardware limited to the Oculus Rift. Gamers hate that sort of thinking.
Valve invests money in developers too and doesn't make them sign exclusive deals, so why does Oculus feel the need to?
Probably Facebook. Facebook has a policy of trying to control every ecosystem it becomes a part of. This seems like par for the course at this point.
