The rift between Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey and the company he left earlier this year appears to be growing wider.
Luckey is putting some of the money he made from Facebook buying his VR company to ensure that users of a different VR headset can play the exclusive titles that Facebook is funding.
On Wednesday, the Oculus founder pledged to donate $2,000 per month to the developer of the software Revive, a program that allows HTC Vive users to play Oculus exclusive titles built for the Rift. The donation was made to the developer’s Patreon account.
In a note on his page, the developer, Jules Blok, expressed his appreciation and revealed the donor was indeed Luckey. “As some of you suspected the sudden extreme jump in the pledge amount is indeed by Palmer Luckey. I’d like to thank him for his pledge and everything he has done for the VR community as a whole,” he wrote.
We’ve reached out to Palmer Luckey and Facebook for comment.
Facebook has pledged a half-billion to developers building content for the Oculus platform. Many of these developers agree to make their titles exclusive to the Rift or GearVR platform for a certain length of time.
Though Facebook has heralded many of the Oculus exclusive titles as a draw to their VR platform, Luckey has long seemed more indifferent to locking down content. “If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want,” Luckey wrote, in part, in a Reddit post last year.
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Luckey has had a bit of a turbulent tenure with the company that acquired his startup Oculus VR for around $3 billion.
The Oculus founder caught some flack last year after donating $10,000 to an anti-Clinton political action group called Nimble America, a move that caught the ire of many in Silicon Valley and the VR developer community. Luckey minimized public appearances following the controversy before leaving Facebook this past March, more than three years after his startup had been acquired. Luckey is now working on a lidar border defense technology startup.
