How to Play Oculus Rift Exclusive Games on your HTC Vive using Revive
Who says you can’t have the best of both worlds?
Now that Oculus has lifted its silly hardware DRM check, it’s time to get back into enjoying everything that virtual reality has brought about. If you picked up an HTC Vive instead of the Rift, you might be lamenting that decision, wishing that you’d picked up a Rift just for the couple of really nifty looking games the headset has to offer, or just wishing Oculus hadn’t stuffed their good stuff behind exclusivity. This guide will show you how to dash those hateful thoughts, by helping you get your HTC Vive setup to play Oculus Rift games. Let’s get started.
Unfortunately, the only way to play Oculus exclusive games on the Vive right now, is to use a third party program developed by LibreVR. The program, Revive, basically adds an addition overlay to the SteamVR program, which then allows you to tap into your Oculus games. Before purchasing any titles off of Oculus Home, please make sure to check the compatibility list to make sure Revive supports it, as many games still have some problems running through the program.
The first thing you need to do is install Oculus Home, and make sure to skip the additional first-time setup, as you will not need it. Now it’s time to find a game you’re interested in, purchase and download it. Once the game is installed, download and install the Revive installer. Install it to your preferred directory, it can easily be updated by overwriting previous versions, and then reboot or boot up SteamVR. Open up the Dashboard by pressing the Menu button on the Vive controller, and then navigate to the Revive Dashboard along the bottom.
If you do not see the Revive tab, head to the Start Menu on your desktop, and boot it up.
That’s the basic method for using the HTC Vive to play Oculus exclusive games. Be wary of some of the games, as they do still have some kinks to work out, but overall we experienced very fluid play in our test of the software using Lucky’s Tale, which played very smoothly, and didn’t offer up any issues.
One last tidbit of knowledge, if you do need to recenter the headset position for a seated position, you can easily do so in the Steam VR Dashboard by holding down the Menu button and choosing Recenter seated position.
If you get any kind of error message like “Entitlement check failed”, go ahead and reboot the Oculus Home service by navigating to Settings > Beta > Restart Oculus.
If you’d like to check out more ways to use the Revive software, head on over to the official LibreVR Github, where you can download all of the Revive related documentation, software installers, and see detailed instructions for more ways to make use of LibreVR’s software.
