The developers behind three of VR’s most popular titles coming to Facebook’s Oculus Quest standalone VR system are saying they won’t support cross-buy between versions of their games sold through the Oculus Store.
Some other developers, like Fast Travel Games, are supporting the feature on Facebook’s Oculus Store which will award owners of both Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift headsets with the game across both systems if purchased for one of them. If you already own Apex Construct on Rift, for example, it should be waiting in your library on Oculus Quest when it arrives on May 21.
Developer Choices
But Polyarc, Beat Games and the developers of Superhot say they won’t support the feature for their base games. Beat Games clarified in a tweet that cross-buy will be supported for downloadable content “Music Packs” purchased through the Oculus Store.
Anyway, players who purchased or will purchase upcoming Beat Saber Music Packs through Oculus Store will have all their packs available as cross buy on Oculus Store. [2/2]
— Beat Saber (@BeatSaber) May 14, 2019
Oculus Quest is a completely standalone VR console which doesn’t require a phone or PC to operate. It takes considerable effort and development resources for developers who built PC versions of their games to port it to the new Android-based system. According to Beat Games, the reason for not supporting the feature is that “it is a new platform and porting the game took a significant amount of time and resources. Second, we think it would be unfair for Oculus users who bought the game on Steam.”
While Beat Saber is essentially the same game across systems (though its level editor is PC only), Superhot is a more immersive title on Oculus Quest with the wireless freedom of 360-degree movement.
“It took quite some time, energy and resources to prepare a well-known and widely (maybe even wildly!) liked game for a totally new platform,” reads a message from a Superhot representative. ” Handing it out for free would not only hamper our future possibilities to bring you new, equally gripping games, but it is just not really true that it is the same product.”
We confirmed with the developers of Superhot that this reasoning is accurate. We also confirmed with Polyarc that they will not be participating in cross-buy for their adorable mouse-adventure Moss. The game will be getting a new level on Quest first, though.
