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Social gaming. Once believed to be the antithesis of what gaming should be. In the early days gaming was seen to be something solitary and cut off from both reality and society; however, in the following years we have seen a huge shift in this mentality, with video games becoming commonplace, the rise of the MMO genre, and the recent dominance of games such as Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite.
However as much as the industry has shifted to getting people to play together, there are still holdouts, with the recent announcement that Fortnite will be implementing cross play between PC, Xbox, Mobile and working toward compatibility with Nintendo’s Switch console, the question has once again been posed, why are Xbox and PS4 not crossing over?
With a handful of options for gaming growing, the recent announcement that Xbox, PC, Mobile and Nintendo will be allowing cross platform experiences has been well received, similarly Sony has enabled cross play with PC and mobile, but we are still yet to see a proper Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo cross platform experience so no matter your preference it is currently not possible to team up with or take on players from Microsoft or Sony’s premier consoles from their competitor.
This question is not a new one, with other popular multi platform games having been made available for cross play between PC and console and Fortnite itself accidentally allowing cross play between the Xbox and Playstation versions of the games for a short time.
So that leads to the question, why is cross platform play between the two consoles not enabled? Well if it was up to Microsoft, it would be.
Microsoft representative Phil Spencer has made a recent effort to express his interest in cross platform gameplay, even tweeting that he wished the accidental Fortnite crossplay enabled by Epic games would remain, Sony’s representatives have been far less vocal on the matter, with smaller statements on the subject such as when the issue was brought up with Minecraft cross play, advising their refusal to allow cross play was “for the children” because they cannot control what their players are exposed to outside of their network.
One interesting thing to note is that Microsoft have been openly against cross network play in the past, citing the same concerns that Sony mentioned, but since the PS4 started outselling the Xbox One their concerns seem to have cleared up and they are all for cross platform gaming.
An episode of the show South park also tackled the subject a few years ago (cleverly weaving in a storyline very heavily lampooning Game of Thrones) in which Xbox and Playstation are opposing factions in the gaming war and a choice must be made, a side must be chosen, unfortunately with the lack of cross platform connection currently available the episode is still all too real a concern for gaming fans.
Will we ever see a world in which Microsoft and Sony both allow cross play? At this stage no, but with Nintendo joining, it seems like it’s only a matter of time until we can all play together happily.