This E3 was a good one for many who are fans of playing online games with friends and strangers on various console and PC platforms. Psyonix has announced that a newly announced Switch version of Rocket League will be able to interface with existing versions on the Xbox One and PC. And Microsoft announced that online Minecraft players would soon be unified across Switch, Xbox One, PC, mobile and VR platforms.
Both lists are missing Sony’s PlayStation 4, which is keeping its players separate from the PlayStation Network for now.
“The honest answer is that PlayStation hasn’t given us permission yet,” Psyonix VP of Publishing Jeremy Dunham told Polygon about the reason for the Rocket League‘s cross-platform blocking on PS4. Since Psyonix has its own servers and those servers are already certified to Microsoft’s strict technical and security requirements to connect to Xbox Live, adding PS4 is “literally something we can do metaphorically at the touch of a button,” he added. he to it. “In reality, it’s a web page with a checkbox on it. All we need to do is check that box and it should be up and running all over the world in less than an hour. That’s all we need to do.”
Minecraft Communications manager Aubrey Norris came in with a similar feeling on Twittersaying “we would love to have PlayStation players along with the united Minecrafthope we can.”
Sony’s Jim Ryan told Eurogamer this week that the company has no “profound philosophical stance” against cross-platform play, pointing to previous examples of such play between PlayStation and PC. In front of Rocket League and Minecraft“However, it is a commercial discussion between ourselves and other stakeholders, and I am not going to go into that in detail in this particular case,” Ryan said.
“We need to be aware of our responsibility to our installation base,” Ryan continued. “Minecraft, the demographics that play that, you know as well as I do, it’s all ages, but it’s also very young. We have a contract with the people who go online with us, that we take care of them and that they are within the universe curated by PlayStation. Exposing what in many cases are children to outside influences that we cannot manage or care for is something that we have to think very carefully about.”
That excuse seems a bit lame to us, given that even the usually overprotective Nintendo is comfortable plugging in Switch Minecraft with other platforms. But we digress… Ever since Microsoft first made a big push for cross-platform play on Xbox Live more than a year ago, Sony has said it’s “happy to be talking about this” with developers. In the months since, however, developers have continued to emphasize that Sony itself is the only remaining barrier to connecting the PS4 to external platforms for their games.
“We also have a technical solution for PS4 and would like to add Sony’s platform to cross-play at the start of the open beta,” CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwiński said last year. Gwent. “All we need is a green light from Sony.”