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"Is VR exclusivity bad for consumers and devs, or is it a necessary part of doing business?"

It's a terrible idea, obviously. Especially right now when either HMD doesn't have enough content to stand on it's own. Valve does their best to support the Rift in their software. Oculus does not reciprocate the action and instead works hard to ensure the Vive WON'T operate in Oculus software.

One of these is trying to help an industry. The other is only trying to look after itself. Funny how that worked out after all those speeches Palmer made about "what's best for the industry".

A whole bunch of people will say that exclusivity is a bad idea and I understand that, we as consumers want to experience all that our devices are capable of. Its absurd to think of the concept of purchasing a monitor that you can only watch netflix on and no other streaming service is supported.

I'm here to consider the positive points of exclusivity from both a consumer perspective and a investor perspective.

So let me begin.

As a consumer we participate in exclusivity every day. There is a reason money exists and prices of items differ, people with more money have access to more things. These things are not always better; Beats by Dre cost way more than senheizer yet the senheizer products are usually better (derivative I know but I'm not making this 20 pages long). We have exclusivity in this regard to develop "classes".

In the gaming industry the term "exclusives" carries a different experience, we encounter exclusives most often when dealing with console gaming. This practice came from when we were all much younger and compatibility wasn't as diverse as it is today. Today's titles do not need to be exclusive to platforms as they were in the past when they would need a complete overhaul to run on multiple platforms. The concept is propagated and allowed by consumers allowing the practice.

So now that we have covered what exclusives are lets look at it in terms of a VR experience.

To the consumer, exclusivity leaves a bad taste as: this expensive piece of hardware you hold in your hand is fully capable of doing exactly what you want but because of the greed of a company you can't use as you intended. This viewpoint is completely understandable and is probably the predominant opinion.
But
VR is a very very new technology and is on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and this above all is what consumers want the most. This iteration is definitely not the first time the world has tried on its VR undies, the virtual boy and stereoscopic movies come to mind. For VR to become accepted we really need this time to be the time we keep them on and not soil ourselves and start crying. Having occulus control which games are available to the Rift is a move in that direction, if they can for sure say that with known hardware and a tested game you wont vomit all over yourself and get an epileptic episode then we can be sure of a good user experience.

So now from the people actually making the thing.

A metric fuck-ton (accepted SI unit of measurement) of money and time has been devoted to making this a reality. Exclusivity ensures that the investors receive their input back and will therefore fund more research. Valve is a digital media distributor, their success is not based on the performance of the Vive (hatz money>VR money), hell I'm sure they made the Vive just to show they can. Exclusives reduce the investment risk for OEMs making future generations more probable.

VR isnt meant to be mainstream yet, there are still teething issues such as the mountainous barrier to entry forcing only the top tier to actually test it and not have little Timmy from Colorado walk off his balcony and have his mom sue Valve for crippling her kid with this "anti social senses robbing addictive mind drug mask"

So TL;DR: Exclusives are not as bad as they seem, they are necessary for development of this fledgling technology, as long as they are not abused.