Sony Interactive Entertainment is now a supporter of crossplay. Or at least, that’s the impression that it gives the video gamer base. And PlayStation head Jim Ryan says that the company wants more of it in more games.
Ryan told Axios in an interview that as a company, “we support and encourage crossplay”. The number of games that support it will also “continue to grow”. Ryan also cites titles like Fortnite, Rocket League, Call of Duty and Minecraft as current examples.
It’s interesting that Ran would bring up Fortnite as an example though. Especially when recent history involving the game showed that PlayStation is the slowest of all the platform holders to actually support crossplay. It also doesn’t help that, with the Epic vs Apple legal battle, unearthed documents showed the extent of that unwillingness to have crossplay.
Good news or bad news first? Good News: An update for Borderlands 3 has been prepared for release that includes full crossplay support across all platforms. Bad News: For certification, we have been required by the publisher to remove crossplay support for PlayStation consoles.
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) May 27, 2021
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Adding to that “doesn’t help” pile is a recent tweet by Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox Software. The tweet is from a month ago, but it says that Borderlands 3 had to remove crossplay support from PS consoles. Which may or may not have anything to do with SIE charging for crossplay if a game makes more money on microtransactions on another platform.
On that, Ryan says that he doesn’t want to talk about a “live business issue with a long-standing partner”. But he insists that “our policies are consistent across all of the publishers”.
(Source: Axios)
