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Elite: Dangerous dev Frontier focuses on SteamVR

As work continues on adding official Oculus Rift support.

UPDATE: Frontier community chief Zac Antonaci has issued a follow-up statement, and said the developer continues to work with Oculus on Elite Dangerous Rift support.

In a post on the Elite Dangerous forum, Antonaci revealed Frontier's focus shifted to SteamVR in part because of an early delivery of a stable software development kit.

ORIGINAL STORY: Frontier has confirmed Elite: Dangerous does not currently officially support virtual reality headset Oculus Rift.

The developer is focusing, instead, on SteamVR.

Eurogamer was tipped off to a potential drop of support for Oculus Rift by a source who pointed to the lack of mention of the headset on the Elite: Dangerous store.

When contacted about the change, Frontier confirmed its move to focus on SteamVR.

The obvious follow-up question was whether the move was prompted by Frontier signing an exclusivity deal to release Elite: Dangerous on the HTC Vive first, but the Cambridge developer insisted this was not the case.

Frontier issued Eurogamer the following statement:

The news comes as some surprise, given Frontier has used Oculus Rift to demo Elite: Dangerous' virtual reality potential at a raft of events over the past two years.

Those within the game's community, however, might have seen this coming. Elite: Dangerous ceased to work with Oculus Rift builds post 0.6. Indeed the developer took to its own forum earlier this month to address concern about the headset ahead of pre-orders going live.

"With the news that Oculus are starting pre order of their consumer version tomorrow, I wanted to just make a quick post to confirm that we are still actively working with Oculus but currently the only SDK we are able to officially support is 0.6," community chief Zac Antonaci said.

Cover image for YouTube videoElite: Dangerous Horizons - my (disastrous) first hour