We’ve seen a whole lot of developers begin to call Sony out on the favouritism they are allegedly exhibiting when it comes to allowing developers to implement cross-platform play with other consoles on PS4. While Fortnite and Rocket League both allow it, Sony’s original announcement was careful in stating that they would only allow “select” games to have the functionality.
And yet, in an interview with Game Informer, PlayStation boss Shawn Layden seemed to refute any such claims, suggesting that Sony does not play favorites, and any developer who wants to implement the feature in their game simply needs to apply with their PlayStation account manager.
“We got to that place in Fortnite and it seems to be going reasonably well, from what I can tell,” he said. “The Rocket League light up will happen soon. People keep saying, “Why doesn’t Sony allow more people to have it?” We’re open for business on this one. All it takes is for publishers and developers who wish to permission it. As ever, just work with your PlayStation account manager, and they will walk you through the steps that we’ve learned through our partnership with Epic on how this works. I don’t believe right now there is any gating factor on that. I think they’re open to make proposals, because the Fortnite thing worked pretty well.”
Someone is very clearly not being entirely upfront in this situation. Sony’s original update on this matter explicitly stated that they will only allow select third party games to enable the functionality, so either the policy changed recently (in the wake of Fortnite’s success with this program, as Layden seems to suggest), or he himself isn’t that familiar with how his company is handling the functionality. Whatever it is, I hope all parties involved figure this thing out soon, so that we can start seeing more cross-platform play in future games.
