Security Certificate Issues Disable All Oculus Rifts [Updated]

Update (3/8/2018): Oculus has issued a software update to address this problem, which you can download from their website. Once you’ve downloaded and applied the patch, your Rift will work again. Oculus also announced it was extending a $15 store credit to all accounts affected by the issue. It’s not clear who counts as “affected;” I checked my own Rift account, but did not receive a $15 store credit.

Regardless of the store credit issue, the problem has been fixed and a patch is available for all Rift owners.

Original Story:

If your Oculus Rift has suddenly quit working, well, we have good news and bad news. The bad news is, your Oculus Rift doesn’t work. The good news is, it’s a temporary problem.

The problem, according to Neowin, is an expired certificate in the Oculus Runtime Service, which needs to be updated. The file in question, OculusAppFramework.dll, will throw an error to this effect when the Oculus Store attempts to launch.

The simplest way to solve the problem is to set your computer’s date back to a time before March 7. Do that, and the issue will solve itself for the time being. Resetting the system date can cause issues with other services, so it’s not an ideal fix, but it works in the short term. Oculus has also tweeted it’s aware of the problem and will have a fix rolled out as soon as possible.

So How’s VR Doing, Anyway?

Short answer: It’s really hard to tell.

Long answer: It’s really hard to tell and I’m annoyed by that.

For nearly a year, we kept a consistent record of VR adoption until dramatically changing demographics on Steam changed all of its data. When PUBG went live in China, the massive influx of Chinese players changed all of Steam’s user data, a fact clearly visible in the company’s monthly results on the main Steam Hardware Survey page. Those giant bumps in Nvidia GPU market share, the sharp cut to AMD’s CPU market share, and the surge in Windows 7 installations? That’s all the impact of the Chinese market.

At some further point, Steam decided to start reporting VR market share within the space (as in which vendor has the majority of the market within the group of people who have VR headsets) and as a percentage of total users. Unfortunately, the aforementioned surge has continued to disrupt reporting — the number of people listed as having a VR headset as a percentage of all Steam users is currently 0.28 percent. In August, prior to the statistical skew, 0.42 percent of users had a VR headset.

This data may show that the Oculus Rift has become more popular than the HTC Vive, with a current listed 0.14 percent market share for Rift and 0.13 percent for Vive. compared with 0.23 percent for Vive and 0.19 percent for Rift prior to the PUBG launch. But right now, even this is unclear. Windows Mixed Reality headsets have claimed about 5 percent of the market amid people who own headsets, but no single set has reached a high enough market share to register on Steam’s radar.

The one potential negative we see? There’s no evidence VR was a major hardware mover this past holiday season in the PC world.

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