While Sony allows full cross-platform play in some games on the PS4, such as with Rocket League and Fortnite, they aren’t letting every developer who wants to implement it do it either, unlike Microsoft or Nintendo. We already saw the developers of War Thunder, Gaijin Entertainment, call Sony out on playing favorites with doling out permission for cross-platform play recently. Now, it seems Hi-Rez Studios, the developers of Smite, Paladins, and Realm Royale, are joining in, too.

President Stewart Chisam recently posted a tweet calling Sony out on exactly this on Twitter. For people who believe there are no tangible benefits to a feature like that, Chisam also posted several that his company’s games saw once cross-platform play between Xbox One and Switch was implemented, including a reduction in wait times and bad matches for players.

On the whole, I stand with these developers on this issue—cross-platform play is the future, and Sony needs to just stop picking and choosing who it lets implement the feature.

https://twitter.com/schisam/status/1093887667190808576?s=21

Xplay improves match quality in multiplayer games. When we added crossplay between Paladins Xbox and Switch:
>> Wait time reduced 30%
>> Level spread between players down 40%
>> 40% reduction in ELO std deviation per match
>> 80% reduction in "Bad" matches (by our internal defn)

— Stewart Chisam (@schisam) February 8, 2019

Paladins, Smite, and Realm Royale developer Hi-Rez Studios is undergoing some big changes. It recently announced via a press release that it will be splitting up into three new studios that will each handle a different game. Titan Forge Games will be in charge of Smite, the studio’s popular action MOBA. Paladins will be handled by Evil Mojo, while Heroic Leap will manage its battle royale spin-off Realm Royale.

Managing all three teams will be general manager Chris Larson, who is formerly an executive producer for Smite and Paladins. The idea behind establishing separate studios for its games is to allow for more dedicated support to each individual community. Of course, it also allows the studio to handle multiple games better.

“The establishment of Titan Forge, Heroic Leap and Evil Mojo as standalone studios enables each of our development teams to fulfil their maximum potential and stay hyper-focused on serving their individual player communities,” said Larson. “Our games are built to provide near constant updates over many years. By giving each major game its own dedicated studio and identity, we empower them to control their own destiny and focus exclusively on their player communities. By structuring ourselves in this manner, we allow the organization to scale to multiple games more easily while ensuring our existing game communities receive a better, more focused service than ever before.”

Paladins released earlier this year after being in early access since 2016, and it’s received a pretty consistent stream of updates, new heroes, and content. Smite continues to receive new updates and events as well, while Realm Royale is still in early access and heading to consoles at some point.

Paladins studio Hi-Rez Studios is apparently planning on bringing some game to the Nintendo Switch. In an interview with DualShockers, Hi-Rez Studio’s CEO Erez Goren stated that the studio is definitely looking at bringing one of its games to the Switch- though he refused to go further into which one it might be.

As a reminder, Hi-Rez works on SMITE and Paladins– the latter would definitely be appreciated on the Switch, since as a hero multiplayer shooter and a battle royale game, it would be filling a gap in the Switch’s library that presently exists. On the other hand, given the Switch’s touch screen and Joycons, I can just as easily see it being SMITE as well.

Whatever it is, we hope it is announced soon- maybe it, too, can be one of the games that is announced at the now nearing mythical status January Nintendo Direct? We’ll keep an eye out for it.