Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic Games, has commented in an interview with Glixel that he believes Oculus is making the same mistakes as Apple by reducing its audience of other virtual reality users.
In order to prevent the same monopoly from occurring that affects a significant part of the mobile phone market, Tim Sweeney has released a message to all VR platforms, urging them to ensure that their devices and stores are open to other providers. Sweeney believes that mistakes are being made, just as the industry is advancing, because he thinks it’s okay for the creator of the device to be the sole distributor of its hardware, but he does not agree with the monopoly in the distribution of software.
Sweeney points out that in the end the open platforms will win, since they will have a better selection of software, and that according to him HTC Vive is following that model that is currently surpassing Oculus in sales by 2 to 1 worldwide, a trend that he believes will continue.
Epic Games is currently developing Robo Recall, an Oculus exclusive title, however, he comments that this is because it has been funded by Oculus and could never have been built on a budget based purely on sales. “Oculus would do better for their store if they tried to attract users by supporting HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and any other PC hardware that comes out. I think if they don’t, they’re going to fail pretty quickly, because you’re not going to want to buy a multiplayer game that you can’t play with half of your VR friends.”
For Tim Sweeney all this is not something new, because in the Steam Dev Days he already made statements about the problems that the future metaverse would bring if it were controlled by a large corporation with a closed platform.
