The cross-platform play controversy has come out into the open again recently, thanks to multiple smaller developers calling Sony out on alleged favoritism when it comes to allowing implementation of the feature on their console. Sony’s Shawn Layden refuted these claims, only for another developer to explicitly and flatly disagree with what he had said, which only added to the drama.

Now, Gaijin Entertainment, the folks who originally called Sony out on their lack of consistency when it comes to cross-platform play, have issued a follow-up statement to Wccftech, where they very explicitly say that most developers are now ready to implement the feature, unlike back when War Thunder first launched, and the feature was relatively new.

“Most, if not all the developers whose titles support cross-play are ready to ‘toggle the switch’ and let full cross-play happen,” they say in their statement. “We’ll be happy if the quote from the Game Informer interview means that getting cross-play clearance will get faster, and will be waiting for the news from our account manager.”

They add that they laud Nintendo and Microsoft for not putting any obstacles in the way of the implementation of the feature, noting the various benefits provided by cross-platform play, and talking about further additions that can be made to make the experience richer for players, such as cross-platform parties and voice chat.

“At Gaijin, we are happy to see that Microsoft and Nintendo went further, allowing cross-console play for all the developers. We are sure that full cross-play is the future of gaming, considering the constantly growing popularity of online titles. For these games, especially those with tier base matchmaking, cross-play is almost essential, as it significantly shortens waiting time for a battle, thus providing better gaming experience. Not to mention that cross-play allows gamers to play with their friends, no matter which platform they are using.

“United matching would be a big step on the way to full cross-play, but only the first one. Voice chat is also important and it’s good to see that Sony allows developers to have cross-platform voice chats in their games. All platform holders should probably iron out their positions on voice/regular chats, ideally allowing seamless experience in all cross-play games for all players regardless of the platform they personally prefer. Next big thing will be cross-platform account migration when players can either play on PC using their console accounts or switch from PC to console saving the progress and purchases. But united matching is what can be already done to provide players with a better gaming experience.”

There are many who like to claim that there are no benefits to something like cross-platform play, but increasingly, we are seeing developers come out and provide tangible evidence of how a game can benefit from the feature. Hopefully, all this noise causes Sony to buckle in full when it comes to cross-platform play with other consoles.

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.

The next generation is surely around the corner at this point. We have rumors pointing at a 2020 release for at least one of the next generation consoles by now, and there’s no reason to suspect that the other one will be much later. With the next gen impending, then, what is it that we might expect from the next systems?

What, for example, is it that developers would want Sony and Microsoft to do with the PS5 and the Xbox Scarlett? Speaking to GamingBolt, Lukasz Janczukco from Juggler Games, developers of  My Memory of Us, said that the one thing they hope both companies continue doing is supporting indie game developers.

“We hope that both Sony and Microsoft will continue the support for indie game developers because we still have a lot of stories to tell and we would like to share them also with console players.”

He also said that cross-platform play won’t be a defining trait of next generation consoles, if only because it’s not a feature that is universally applicable to all games to begin with.

“For sure there are games and genres that will benefit from this solution. It will make easier for communities to share fun and experience. However cross platform in my opinion won’t work universally for all the games so it’s hard for me to believe that it will be defining feature.”

Which makes sense—a single player game, for example, wouldn’t necessarily benefit from cross platform play in the slightest (though it still could offer cross platform progression, that would be more universally applicable no matter what). Nonetheless, I do hope that the move towards cross platform play and progression continues—I think that’s the way of the future, and I would hate for us to go backwards from here, now that even Sony is on board.

Cross platform play in some capacity or the other has been a thing for over a decade now. But it was only with first Rocket League, then Minecraft, and finally Fortnite, that it became a major consumer expectation across the board. Fortnite, especially, being the most popular game in the world, and available on every platform, really helped push cross platform play, to the extent that it was the first game that Sony, the last holdout in the cross platform play stakes, ended up enabling it for.

Speaking with PCGamesN at HRX, Hi-Rez Studios, the folks who brought us Paladins, games that are available across many platforms and have cross platform play to some degree in all of them, spoke about the cross platform play initiative. General manager Chris Larsson specifically singled Epic Games and Fortnite as being the spark that gave rise to the cross platform play flame.

“Epic kind of did a favour for everyone,” he said. “I don’t think Epic wanted cross-play for its own financial gain. It was really to provide a better experience for its players, and I think that in the industry as a whole, that’s going to be a benefit for everyone. Without Epic, we would not be close to cross-play in its current state. It’s only since Fortnite kind of pushed for cross-play that providers have really started to embrace it.

“If you allow people to move their content freely between different platforms, you could lose some people. But at the same time, you may gain a lot of people, and also goodwill on top of it.”

Hopefully, what Epic Games started continues on with more and more games in the future. Fortnite is available on PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android; Paladins is available on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC.

Sony has long resisted calls to open up the PS4 to cross platform play with competing systems; reasons given by the company have ranged from them wanting to protect the children on their consoles from potential unsavoury elements in ecosystems beyond their control, to them thinking the PS4 is just better than all other systems, so who cares about cross platform play with the other systems anyway. It has made them look increasingly backward as third party publishers and developers including Bethesda, Bandai Namco, CD Projekt RED, Psyonix, Epic, and more, have all begun to call them out. And it has begun to make them look backwards and regressive, as Microsoft and even Nintendo, a company famously averse to embracing anything to do with the internet, have jumped into the connected future head on.

"Sony’s resistance has made them look increasingly backward as third party publishers and developers including Bethesda, Bandai Namco, CD Projekt RED, Psyonix, Epic, and more, have all begun to call them out."

Worse still, it has actively detracted and degraded the experience of players playing on PlayStation. Minecraft on the PS4 has been a hobbled version, missing out on all the perks of the Better Together update that hit every other currently supported version of the game earlier this year. Most famously, and the whole reason this controversy escalated into being as big as it is, Fortnite players found that they couldn’t log in with their Epic accounts on the Nintendo Switch, even after having disassociated their accounts from PSN, as a result to Sony locking down their ecosystem entirely from Nintendo and Xbox. Moves such as locking third party accounts, and holding player progress hostage, have made Sony come off as increasingly anti-consumer, and at odds with the #4ThePlayers image that they tried so hard to inculcate earlier in the generation.

Incompetent, regressive, inferior, anti-consumer: complaints leveled at Sony. And yet, Sony’s bottom line has hardly suffered from any of this. The PS4 continues to sell at a frankly unprecedented pace for a system that is in its fifth year on the market, and Sony’s first party has never done better than it is doing right now. So in spite of the outrage that Sony has seen online, and even in mainstream media that covered the issue briefly during E3 earlier this year, the company could have easily doubled down and stayed the course, at least for the rest of the generation. Goodness knows that that’s what Microsoft and Nintendo would have done in the past. And this is not a hypothetical—we have evidence that both companies are usually content to not rock the boat when they’re doing well. Microsoft was criticized for the Xbox Live paywall even for third party apps like Netflix, or free services like the internet browser, but the company staunchly refused to back down from that until the tumultuous launch of the Xbox One. Nintendo has been criticized for the dismal and frankly baffling approach it takes to online services for the better part of a decade now, and we still can’t say that they’ve responded to player criticism too well here, given the voice chat shenanigans they put you through on the Switch.

"It is easy for the market leader to grow complacent, and then try to keep things the way they have been going so far—after all, they’ve worked this long, so why change up a winning formula, right?"

All of which is to say, it is easy for the market leader to grow complacent, and then try to keep things the way they have been going so far—after all, they’ve worked this long, so why change up a winning formula, right? It’s a mentality that you can sort of understand—but also one that leaves them open to being usurped by a competitor willing to respond to consumer complaints in that moment of time, and it is also the reason that Nintendo and Microsoft have both, while having led the market on a few occasions in the last two decades, never been able to stay on top. They grow bloated and complacent once they’re in the lead, and leave an opening for a competitor to undercut them.

And that’s where Sony is different, as evidenced by their surprisingly quick reaction to the cross platform and cross progression play issue. Right here was an issue that a company currently at the top of the world, leading the market, with no hopes of its immediate competition catching up with it at any time in the near future, could have afforded to ignore. Dig your heels in, plug your ears, and drown out the noise of the outrage. After all, what will the market do? If they want to play Spider-Man, where else will they go? Where else can they go? It would have been no different from how Nintendo or Microsoft have responded to similar complaints in the past, right?

"This is why Sony has led the console market more than Nintendo or Microsoft in the last twenty years—they’re entirely proactive, not just reactive."

But this is why Sony has led the console market more than Nintendo or Microsoft in the last twenty years—they’re entirely proactive, not just reactive. They could have chosen to ignore the outcry, but that would have been short sighted, and they would have risked fostering ill will and negative sentiment towards the brand they have worked so hard to rebuild over the last five years, and could have come back to affect them with the PS5 launch. Instead, they got ahead of the issue, and nipped it in the bud, addressing it when they had no immediate impetus to do so, and thereby ensuring they would get plaudits, and good PR, along the way. They ensured that any possibility of a long term spectre or advantage the competition could boast of over them was eliminated right away.

This is the mark of a true market leader- the popular maxim is, “skate to where the puck is going, not where it is”. It’s a way of saying that to ensure long term market dominance, you need to keep moving, and not afford to get complacent or take your foot off the pedal. Sony, with their moves this generation, of which their response to the cross platform play controversy is just the latest one, have demonstrated a capacity of doing just that. They have demonstrated, once again, why they are a true market leader.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

One of the most continually surprising things about Nintendo over the last year or so has been the company’s willingness to embrace cross platform play. While it is true that Nintendo allowed it going all the way back to the Wii and Wii U, it’s still really heartening to see a company as insular as Nintendo, and as usually backwards on online and network trends, embrace cross platform play so whole heartedly, with little to no stipulations involved.

Speaking to investors at a shareholders meeting, Nintendo’s executive officer Susumu Tanaka discussed the company’s stance towards the functionality going forward, noting that it is something they would continue to help developers implement whenever they want it in their games.

“Crossplay basically comes about from conversations between publishers and platform holders,” Tanaka said. “We are inclined to do what we can to help publishers incorporate crossplay when that is what they want. The other parties involved also have a say in whether we are able to reach this outcome or not, so we will continue to discuss it with them.”

So Nintendo, on their part, seem to be all on board with allowing the feature. Of course, as they note- though they never name anyone- there might be other parties or companies that might not be willing to implement the functionality, in which case there isn’t anything Nintendo themselves can do about it. But as far as they are concerned, they won’t stand in the way of it happening. Which is good. Cross platform play and progression will be the future- and it’s good to see that for once, they’ve embraced a forward looking trend.

Sony has been the lone holdout for cross platform play, a position that has become more and more untenable for them as more and more high profile games, such as Rocket League, Minecraft, Paladins, and Fortnite, have become fully cross platform play, including between rival consoles Nintendo Switch and Xbox One. It’s a situation that has come to a head with the launch of Fortnite on the Switch, which makes sense, given that it i the most popular game in the world at the moment.

Sony’s response to the whole controversy has been flaccid and limp, first making a lame excuse about cross platform play not being safe “for children” last year, and then completely sidestepping the issue with their response to the controversy this year. However, now, in a new response by SIE America’s head Shawn Layden, we get what might be their most honest response to the situation so far.

“We’re hearing it,” Layden said to EuroGamer. “We’re looking at a lot of the possibilities. You can imagine that the circumstances around that affect a lot more than just one game. I’m confident we’ll get to a solution which will be understood and accepted by our gaming community, while at the same time supporting our business.”

Layden’s admission that it is about “supporting their business” is at least honest, and confirms something that everyone already knew- Sony has no principled opposition to the idea, they are just doing it for business reasons. Which is fine- but hopefully, they can in fact create a compromise that meets players’ needs, as well as their own.

Nintendo has proven to be a surprisingly progressive pioneer and stalwart of cross platform play on its platform. While they have always allowed cross platform play going as far back as the Wii U, with the Switch, they have embraced the concept in its entirety, championing it in major games such as Rocket League, Minecraft, and most recently, Fortnite.

In these games, and in many others, Switch players can play with Xbox One, PC, iOS, Android, and Mac players- but not PS4. PS4 owners get shut out of this massive cross platform play pool- because Sony won’t allow cross platform play with other consoles for whatever reason. They will allow it with PC and mobile, but not with other consoles. When they are asked about it, they mumble lame excuses, but have never actually relented on the matter, in spite of many developers explicitly calling them out on it.

Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime was asked by IGN in an interview to comment on the matter- and he had some very biting words to say. “We embrace working with a developer and enabling them to bring their vision to life and whether that’s Fortnite, whether that’s a number of the other games that have cross-platform play on our console, from a developer standpoint that’s what we want,” he said. “And we work hard with them to bring that to life. What competitors do is their decision to make. We believe being both developer-forward and fan-forward is in the best interest of the game.”

Sony- you are in a position when Nintendo is being more forward thinking, more pro-consumer, and more developer-friendly, than you, and they are calling you out on it publicly. That is the world you have created, because you stupidly refuse to relent on this one very important thing. It’s time to do the right thing, Sony, and embrace cross platform play and progression. I promise you, you won’t lose customers because of it- in fact, many more Xbox and Nintendo owners are likelier to switch to your platform if they know they can continue playing their favorite games right where they left off if they do get a PlayStation.

Cross platform play has become a hot topic over the last year or so, especially thanks to Nintendo finally allowing its players to play with other consoles and systems- meaning PlayStation and Sony are now the odd ones out, as they refuse to allow cross platform play on their consoles with Switch or Xbox One.

But speaking at GDC, Epic’s Tim Sweeney noted that cross platform play across these platforms happening is only a matter of time, calling it an inevitability.

“I think it’s inevitable now,” he said. “Games have become social experiences in the same way that Facebook or Twitter have, and these experiences only really make sense if gamers can communicate with all of their friends.

“For Sony and Microsoft to support their customers well they have to be open to all their customer’s friends – their real world friends – otherwise they’re breaking up real-world social groups. Like kids in school have their friends, and do you expect this platform schism to divide them into two separate groups that can’t play together? No. It’s got to come together now.

“That one remaining barrier will inevitably come down.”

I have to agree with him- Sony can afford to stall on this conversation right now, with the PS4 being in the lead, but as we all know, each generation is a reset, and when the PS5 and Xbox One successor join the Switch, everyone will be starting from scratch. At that point, they would be remiss to not join the cross platform play wave in the rest of the industry- otherwise, they will miss out on what, as Sweeney points out, is the way of the future.

[via GamesIndustry]

Cross-platform play is something that was once considered almost impossible to achieve, given the competitive nature of the market and those participating in it, but slowly and surely, it has indeed become a reality over the last few years. Both the Nintendo Switch and the Xbox One allow cross-platform play for online multiplayer games, and games such as Rocket League, for instance, have only benefited from this.

The one major player that has refused to take part in this, however, is Sony, with the PS4 still not supporting cross-platform play. They’ve received their fair share of criticism for this, and rightly so too. Game Informer recently also posted an opinion piece on the short-sightedness of Sony in this issue, when Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra, who is the vice president of the Xbox division, replied to the Tweet on the article and gave his own two cents.

Ybarra said that people want larger pools of players to play with and against while playing competitive multiplayer, and that that isn’t something that is going to go away anytime soon. And that makes a lot of sense. It’s hard to see why Sony can’t see that too. Cross-platform play should be a basic minimum, and Sony’s restrictive practices can only prove detrimental to them and PlayStation owners in the long run.

Our data shows people want larger multiplayer pools of people to play with and the choice to play together. This isn't going away. https://t.co/QRLhLrSoth

— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) August 4, 2017