Sony Interactive Entertainment announced a crossplay beta for Fortnite that will allow for cross platform play, progression, and commerce across PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac.
Previously, Sony had blocked this ability with CEO Kenichiro Yoshida citing that was primarily because they felt that PS4 offered the best experience for players which they did not want to compromise.
This 180-degree turn was fueled by pressure not from just PlayStation players but also game developers who can easily shift where they launch titles (exclusively) first. This change is of course very big news because this effectively means a more competitive environment across all of these platforms (where each stakeholder will want the gaming experience to be the best on their respective platforms).
Fortnite being as heavily cross platform (and dominant) game helped paved the way with changing Sony’s mind because PS4 players would’ve been disadvantaged in terms of having full access to the larger player population pool that the other platforms (with their ability to crossplay) would’ve had. Additionally, that earlier decision of blocking crossplay was giving PS4 players a reason to potentially look at migrating away from the platform; I should know since even though I don’t play much on my PS4, that decision (to block crossplay) was something I was factoring in for whatever next generation console Microsoft and Sony were planning (and I was frankly leaning away from Sony).
Console exclusives are going to matter a whole lot more once this beta moves past that stage and more titles push for a larger cross platform presence (where you can play with anyone regardless). It represents a shift on the development side as well because games will need to be properly designed to have fair play across a wide variety of form factors and input/output. To put it more simply, the consumers win especially for titles that have this cross platform presence where they’ve been designed to be able to play with each other. This could also breathe new life into MMO’s where they can tap into a larger pool of players regardless of which console or PC they run on (again, if they are properly designed).
It will be interesting to see how Blizzard Entertainment handles this going forward for example with Diablo III since it is established now across PC, Mac, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. I’m almost expecting Echtra Games to take advantage of this with Torchlight Frontiers once they’ve analyzed this. This is very exciting times for gamers except maybe those on the Mac platform where AAA development is on the lower end of the priority scale (due to a number of reasons including hardware choices by Apple along with the depreciation of OpenGL and requirement of Metal on macOS Mojave which was released earlier this week).
UPDATE: Game industry weighs in on this announcement.
Unsurprisingly, many applauded the move but also clearly mentioned they’ll be observing the results of the beta testing. Some developers were also realistic about the chances of some of their titles not likely to ever be crossplay compliant (like Bethesda’s Fallout 76) since there are challenges involved with how games are designed and then balanced between desktop, mobile, and console platforms. Also not surprising was that some of these companies used Sony’s prior stance as a partial reason for the lack of crossplay (without fully noting before their own internal technical challenges and design constraints).
Activision Blizzard also weighed in by stating “There’s still a lot of work to do on both our side and the platform side to understand whether cross-play might be integrated into our other games, so we’ll be watching the upcoming test and will assess what the potential impact of this feature would be for our players and our games.”
An isometric/fixed camera game like Diablo III will likely not see crossplay given how changes are made based on I/O for example (mouse pointer being more precise compared to controller input which means changing the way the certain skills; especially single target ones, and monster AI works) whereas an FPS with a first person camera like Overwatch and card game like Overwatch stands a higher probability.
As I noted up top, games will really need to be conceptualized and designed from the ground up to really offer a crossplay setup that functions fairly across all form factors.
