Cross-play continues to be a major topic of discussion in the industry, especially in recent days with all that’s been going on with the ongoing controversy surrounding Sony and a number of indie developers. The hope remains that by the time the next generation of consoles comes around, such issues will have been put to rest, and cross-play will be a widely accepted and used feature.
As per Nine Dots Studio CEO Guillaume Boucher-Vidal, though, who’s serving as the creative lead on the developer’s upcoming open world RPG Outward, though cross-play obviously has many big advantages, it’s also something that could be disruptive for smaller multiplayer focused games. Essentially, according to Vidal, bigger multiplayer games might grow bigger, which would mean that the smaller ones might find it even harder to compete.
“While I think it’s nice for players to be able to play together no matter the platform, I predict that this will make big games bigger and leave even less room for the smaller games to find their audience,” said Boucher-Vidal in an exclusive interview with GamingBolt. “There can only be so many multiplayer games that are highly active at the same time due to the network effect. If all platforms share the same ecosystem, the number of commercially viable multiplayer games might diminish.”
In the same interview, Boucher-Vidal also spoke to us about what he expects from the hardware of next gen consoles in general, and how he hopes their added capabilities will be put to use in future software. Read more about that through here.
Our full interview with Boucher-Vidal will be going live soon, so stay tuned. Nine Dots Studio’s Outward, meanwhile, is scheduled for a 2019 release on PC.
