HTC Vive out-selling Oculus Rift by two-to-one, claims Epic Games' Tim Sweeney

Open-source platforms are the future of VR, according to Sweeney

Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games, has claimed that the HTC Vive is out-selling Facebook's Oculus Rift virtual reality headset by a margin of two-to-one. And PC-based virtual reality games sales are ten times the size of sales of VR games running on smartphones via much cheaper and more widely distributed headsets.

The reason, says Sweeney, is because HTC Vive is based on an open-source platform.

"When you install the Oculus drivers, by default you can only use the Oculus store. You have to rummage through the menu and turn that off if you want to run Steam [the popular PC gaming app run by Valve Software]. Which everybody does. It's just alienating and sends the wrong message to developers.

"It's telling developers: ‘You're on notice here. We're going to dominate this thing. And your freedom is going to expire at some point.' It's a terrible precedent to set. I argued passionately against it," said Sweeney.

As a result, HTC is outselling Oculus by around two-to-one, according to the industry veteran.

Sweeney was talking to fringe gaming magazine Glixel, a spin-off from the arguably better known US publication Rolling Stone.

Open platforms will ultimately win, Sweeney believes. "They're going to have a much better selection of software. HTC Vive is a completely open platform. And other headsets are coming that will be completely open. HTC Vive is outselling Oculus 2-to-1 worldwide. I think that trend will continue."

The HTC Vive has also been pushed via the popular Steam gaming portal owned by Valve Software. It sold-out within hours of going on sale via Steam. According to Sweeney, just over half-a-million PC VR headsets have been sold, while Google et al have shifted a few million smartphone based VR units.

However, in terms of actual software sales, all of the action is on the PC platform, claims Sweeney, and not on smartphone-based mobile VR.

Sweeney's comments come despite his company being funded by Oculus to make a closed-platform game, Robo Recall, purely for the company's own platform.

Virtual reality evangelist Sweeney has long had an interest in VR, playing around with headsets that could render low-resolution (by the standards of today) video back in the early 1990s - video akin to Doom or Duke Nukem.

Epic Games is the company behind the Unreal Engine widely used in games development, as well as the popular Gears of War.

Sweeney foresees a time when pre-rendering media such as cartoons simply won't be necessary - PCs will be able to do that on-the-fly. As a result, "once it's running in real time in a computer, you can strap on a VR headset and actually be immersed in it. You move your head around and see the actual 3D objects from different points of view," he said.

He added: "Maybe you add bits of interactivity to it. I think it's going to create this entirely new type of medium that is somewhere in between a video game and a movie. It's much more scripted and planned-out than a game is now, but it's also more interactive than a movie."

But for the next three years or so, believes Sweeney, VR will barely make a dent in the broader world of gaming.

However, sometime over the next decade or so, Sweeney believes that VR will go suddenly mainstream.

"Over the next 12 years we're going to see VR scale down from a huge helmet to something the size of your glasses, which has a display for each eye that's higher quality than any display you can buy now, and cheaper, because it uses very little material. And that's going to revolutionize all forms of entertainment.

"Instead of having televisions and monitors and smartphone screens, you're going to have this VR device to project imagery wherever you want. It's going to occupy 140 degrees of your field of view - far, far higher quality and more immersive than the best PC entertainment experience you can get today," he said.