Can The HTC Vive Play Oculus Games?

Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are the most popular VR (Virtual Reality) Headsets around at the moment. They are both great for their own reasons. The Oculus Rift is portable and is better at sensing your individual movements, whereas the HTC Vive is without a doubt a better visual experience and has better user-friendly controllers.

No matter what you’re looking for in the headset, the real question might not be about the VR quality, but about the VR games.

Oculus currently has some amazing games which are only available in the Oculus Store. But that doesn’t mean you have to buy the Oculus Rift VR headset, when your heart is demanding the HTC Vive.

The answer to that question is simple. Yes. The difficulty is how. We will explain in more detail how to get those games onto your HTC Vive, but it might be helpful to understand what this all means.

HTC Vive has the best software and hardware, but its problem is that it isn’t portable. The Oculus Rift is easy to pack into your bag, but at the cost of game details. To make up for that lack, they have made some amazing games that Vive cannot touch.

Well, that was the idea at least.

We aren’t going to tell you how to hack your headset or start talking to you about how to do coding. The process is a lot simpler than that. The real problem comes from the fact that any upgrades that the Rift games create might not work straight away on your converted game. You may need to redownload them or check what the makers say about the updates.

Normally HTC Vive players should be buying their games from Viveport or Valve’s Steam store. These games are made for HTC Vive headsets, so check to see if your game is on there first because most of them will be.

Before you even started reading this article, you probably already searched Viveport and Valve’s Steam and couldn’t find the HTC Vive compatible version of the game you’re after. That’s because some games are only available through the Oculus Rift store.

Games such as Lone Echo or experiences like Bulletstorm are not part of the Vive library so you’ll need to find another way to get those games on your HTC Vive.

What you need is Revive.

Revive is a software program, and its whole purpose is to get Oculus Store games onto your HTC Vive, and it does this through the VR itself.

The process is a little lengthy, so follow this step by step list to help you get those exclusive games:

Install the Oculus Rift software onto your console, and skip the steps which ask you to configure the software to your headset.
If you forget to skip, it will try and fail to make the connection and the software might take a while to figure out why it isn’t working.
It won’t damage anything, it will just waste your time.
Install LibreVR’s Revive software by clicking “ReviveInstaller.exe”
They update the software all the time, so make sure you click the most recent version.
Complete the installation instruction that Revive gives you.
It is simple and quick, but make sure you follow it correctly otherwise the software might not work properly.
Go back to the Oculus Store that you installed on step 1.
Purchase the game you want in the Oculus Store, along with any others that pique your interest.
Launch either Viveport or Stream VR, whichever one you normally use.
Put on your HTC Vive headset and travel to your VR Home.
Now your dashboard should have the Revive icon on your Vive Dashboard within the VR experience.
Select the Revive Icon through the VR headset.
Your Oculus Store will appear and you can select your purchased games.
Play the game!

Your games should function normally but there are a couple of differences between the HTC’s slick and comfortable handheld controls and the Oculus Rift Touch controllers.

Revive has created a “catch all” solution to these changes in controls.

Follow that guide to help you understand the different controller directions.

You might have noticed that some games don’t work on the Revive Software. Either they aren’t available or they don’t function properly when you play them. Not many games fall into this category but Dead and Buried and Minecraft do.

Not every game is going to have a software adaptor to help you play it on your HTC Vive headset, but Minecraft is such a well known game, loved by millions of people, that some wonderful developers have created software just so you can play it on the HTC Vive.

What you need is Vivecraft.

Complete the same steps you did for Revive but use Vivecraft instead.

There are loads of software adapters like this around, so if you really want to play a game that Revive can’t help you with, search the internet until you find the software that can.

We would always recommend using Viveport or Valve’s Steam first because most games are compatible with both headsets, but if you can’t find them on those platforms try out Revive.