Polytron and Other Indie Developers Are Dropping Oculus Rift Support After Palmer Luckey Revelations

Last night, news broke that Palmer Luckey, the creator of the Oculus Rift VR headset, has been using his funds to support an anti-Hillary Clinton “shitposting” political group.

The outraged reaction to this has been swift, with a number of independent developers, like Tomorrow Today Labs and Scruta Games, announcing today they were dropping support for the Rift so long as Luckey was still employed by the company. Now Polytron, the indie dev studio behind Fez, has joined in, dropping support for the Rift for its puzzle game SUPERHYPERCUBE.

Polytron and Kokoromi, the collective of game designers working on SUPERHYPERCUBE, said in a joint statement, “In a political climate as fragile and horrifying as this one, we cannot tacitly endorse these actions by supporting Luckey or his platform.”

In an industry where talking about videogames with any sort of critical lens is met with cries of “bias” and “SJW,” dropping support of a major platform because of the politics of its founder is a brave statement to make.

SUPERHYPERCUBE releases on Oct. 13 for PlayStation VR. You can read the studio’s full statement below.

You may have seen the news yesterday that ties Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey to Nimble America, a Trump-endorsing organization Luckey started to defame Clinton via “the power of Internet memes”.

In a political climate as fragile and horrifying as this one, we cannot tacitly endorse these actions by supporting Luckey or his platform.

In light of this, we will not be pursuing Oculus support for our upcoming VR release, SUPERHYPERCUBE.

If you are a voting citizen of the United States, please remember to register and make your voice heard this November 8th. Do not let bigotry, white supremacy, hate and fear win.

Kokoromi & Polytron