There seems to be reason to believe Valve did a 180 on Oculus support and released the Vive after Oculus VR went silent.
This should not be a surprise to folks who closely followed the situation from the start. Valve was not clued in on Oculus VR’s acquisition by Facebook. After they made the announcement, Valve received radio silence from Oculus.
If you may remember, Valve was upbeat about Oculus Rift’s prospects, and bent over backwards to help them succeed. They launched a Steam VR API early for Oculus Rift owners to test out, and even quietly shelved plans to release their own VR.
Coincidentally, HTC was already working on their own VR tech, and approached Valve with their work during the last Steam Dev Days. It’s not clear if both knew about Oculus’ upcoming partnership with Samsung, but everything clearly just went together from there.
You can read the sources and see what you can make of it here.
