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I've been agonising over whether to buy a VR headset and, if yes, which bloody one. This hasn't been made easier by Oculus' insistence on turning what should be a free choice of peripheral purchase into a sad imitation of the Console War by throwing wadges of Facebook money at developers to get exclusivity, exclusivity that is in no way functionally required in code and can only be enforced with DRM. It seems Facebook would rather rule a ruin than compete on the merits of the product and so promote VR.

I was all set to conclude in favour of the Vive out of sheer indignance...and then we got the Microsoft E3 conference and its announcement of Project Scorpio. Unlike Sony's previous announcement of its foray into VR with PSVR, there was no mention of a headset from Microsoft, instead they appear to be focusing on providing console hardware capable of a solid PC-level VR experience. That suggests to me they're not bothering with their own headset, and console being console then, if that's true, they will likely partner up with one of the existing headset manufacturers to offer bundled or even rebranded versions with the Scorpio.

Realistically speaking, whichever of the two they pick is likely to "win" in the long run as it will have a bigger install base and more support from the developer of Windows...and I can't see Microsoft going with the Vive. MS want an iOS-style closed ecosystem on PC, they might not admit as much, but the Windows Store in W10 and the attempt to shift PC gaming over to the UWP app system rather than traditional(and much less controllable) x86/x64 executables shows their intent pretty clearly. Valve, via Steam, are a direct threat to that ambition; other digital distro platforms exist, but they're either publisher-exclusive(and so could be removed/converted to UWP by the usual corporate backroom deals) or small potatoes in relative terms - as far as I can see only Valve have both the resources and the ethos to undermine Microsoft's ambitions. That's not to say Valve are saints or anything, they're just less overtly anti-consumer than the other big players and their continued existence as digital distributors relies on PC remaining an open platform, so they can probably be relied upon to at least be advocating for the same outcomes consumers should be, even if their motives are different.

So now I'm back at square one, trying to decide between two platforms this time not because of "exclusives" that shouldn't even bloody exist, but because there's a chance one of the two will be a lame duck in a couple of years.