Eve Valkyrie to be bundled with every Oculus Rift sold

Facebook-owned Oculus VR has announced a major win in the battle to become the de facto standard for consumer virtual reality: a deal to bundle a copy of heavily-anticipated space shooter Eve: Valkyrie with every Oculus Rift headset sold.

While Oculus VR has been shipping hardware ever since completing a highly-successful Kickstarter campaign, the company is still trudging towards a retail launch. Previous hardware models have been dubbed 'developer kits,' and sold without software on the understanding that those buying will know what to download and how to make it work. The retail launch, scheduled for early next year, will be different: sold in high-street shops, the headsets will end up in the homes of gamers who aren't perhaps quite as ready to start messing about - so it'll need to be ready to go out-the-box.

To help with that, Oculus VR has confirmed a deal with CCP Games to include a free copy of Eve: Valkyrie with every Oculus Rift sold. Designed with VR in mind, the game will be ready-to-run with the Oculus Rift headset and includes features such as tying the headset's head-tracking capabilities into the in-game head-up display (HUD) to allow targeting with a simple glance.

The game isn't destined to become an Oculus Rift exclusive, however: CCP Games still plans to release Eve: Valkyrie on the PlayStation 4, where it will support the PlayStation VR (formerly Project Morpheus) headset. For PC gamers, though, the news is the same as CCP's announcement at the Game Developers Conference in March last year: officially, it will be exclusive to the Oculus Rift, but will likely be hacked shortly after launch to support rival devices like the HTC Vive.