Sony: We Are Totally Open For Crossplay, Game Developers: No, You Totally Are Not

from the cross-purposes dept

It's a really dumb saga that has gone on for far too long, but Sony has built for itself a public history of not allowing gamers to cross-play multiplayer games on their Playstations with players on other consoles. This is all an attempt to get Playstation owners to convince their friends to also buy Playstations so that they can game together, which is exactly the kind of protectionist hardball that makes Sony, you know, Sony. The backlash against Sony last summer was bad enough that Microsoft and Nintendo, rivals in the console space, decided to put out joint advertisements together along with a social media campaign essentially trolling Sony over the issue, while pointing out to gamers worldwide that owners of Nintendo and Xbox consoles very much could play with one another.

In one of the all-time underwhelming responses to a PR crisis in the history of gaming, Sony did enable crossplay... for exactly two games. Fortnite and Rocket League have crossplay enabled, but literally nothing else. Which made it somewhat baffling that the Chairman of Sony Interactive managed to claim in a recent interview that the lack of crossplay at this point was all the developers' fault.

“People keep saying, ‘Why doesn’t Sony allow more people to have it,’” Sony’s Shawn Layden told Game Informer. “All it takes is for publishers and developers who wish to permission it. As ever, just work with your PlayStation account manager, and they will walk you through the steps that we’ve learned through our partnership with Epic on how this works. I don’t believe right now there is any gating factor on that. I think they’re open to make proposals, because the Fortnite thing worked pretty well.”

It's a striking claim in many ways. First, the inclusion of a phrase like "as ever" must surely be infuriating to any developer or gamer who knows the history of crossplay on Sony's hardware. It's not "as ever." At best, it's "as very, very recently." Second, the claim makes no sense. Developers and publishers across the spectrum have managed to get crossplay enabled on Xbox and Nintendo hardware, but the claim is that they've just been too lazy to do so with Sony? All while they're screaming that they want their games to be crossplay enabled? Come on.

And it's not just me saying so. Layden's comments were met with immediate backlash from developers.

Finn Brice, the CEO of Chucklefish, which developed and published the recent Advance Wars-inspired hit Wargroove, took issue with Layden’s characterization in a thread about the interview on the gaming forum ResetEra.

“We made many requests for crossplay (both through our account manager and directly with higher ups) all the way up until release month,” Brice wrote. “We were told in no uncertain terms that it was not going to happen.”

Wargroove is currently available, with cross-play, on Switch, Xbox One, and PC. The game is slated to launch later this year on PlayStation 4. Brice added that while it might be more complicated from a policy standpoint on PlayStation’s part, for Chucklefish, implementing cross-play is as easy as flipping a switch, something people have speculated about ever since Fortnite maker Epic Games accidentally enabled cross-play between Xbox One and PS4 back in September of 2017.

In other words, Sony is Sonying all over this. Why in the world this kind of comment should be thought to do anything other than anger both gamers and game developers alike is beyond me. Blame developers for your own protectionist behavior that refuses what your own customers want? That's ballsy, even for Sony.

Filed Under: crossplay, playstation, video games
Companies: sony

Microsoft And Nintendo Team Up To Troll Playstation In Ads For Not Giving Gamers What They Want

from the trolling-as-advertising dept

Buckle up, because this seemingly mildly interesting story has a ton of intersections on topics we typically talk about here at Techdirt. As a preface, you should recall that we firmly believe that content is advertising and advertising is content. By this we mean that every bit of content a producer makes serves to advertise that producer's wider content library and that advertisements, in order to be engaging, must be useful and/or entertaining every bit as much as more traditional content typically is. We've also talked a great deal about how content producers in the digital spaces must connect with their fanbases, treat them well, and provide them what they want, or risk backlash. Add to that, finally, that we think restrictive protectionism in the name of wider profits often achieves the opposite of that goal.

Which brings us to Microsoft and Nintendo somewhat suprisingly teaming up to push out a bunch of ads centered on the ability for users of either to crossplay games across both systems.

For those of you who cannot see the video embed, it's an ad put out by both Nintendo and Microsoft pointing out that gamers on both systems can crossplay with one another on some games, including the example shown in Minecraft. Frankly, it's quite jarring to see these combo-ads (there are more) put out by two rivals in the console space. If you weren't well-tuned to the video game industry, you'd probably be left wondering what the hell was going on here.

The answer is that these ads are rather entertaining trolling attacks targeting Sony's Playstation 4, which has been the subject of some recent backlash coming out of E3 over the platform's lockdown on its system's games. While there is pretty much no such thing as a Playstation user that does not want crossplay enabled, and there are many who want it very much, Sony has gone the protectionist route. This is an attempt to convince friends of friends to buy Playstations so that they can play together, I suppose, but it's stupid and awful.

Some of the world's biggest games, from Fortnite to Minecraft to Rocket League, all support some variety of crossplay, allowing people with PCs, Xbox Ones, mobiles and Nintendo consoles to play on the same servers. Yet Sony continues to refuse to allow PlayStation consoles to get in on the fun when it comes to playing with Microsoft or Nintendo consoles.

In the wake of E3 and the disappointment of Fortnite's account locking, then, two of the companies that do allow crossplay have teamed up to take a swing at the PlayStation 4 with this commercial for Minecraft, a game that's also available on PS4.

A couple of reactions. First, Sony made this shit-sandwich for itself by not giving its customers what they want for no other reason than protectionism, so it's not without fun to see them have to eat it up. Second, the combo-ads put out by Microsoft and Nintendo are both useful and, if you enjoy watching huge companies troll one another, fairly entertaining. And the companies have kept this up as a coordinated effort, rather than just limiting it to a one-off video ad.

And the Xbox Twitter account responded, of course, happily saying they're ready to build something together. While this might have flown right past many gamers, enough will realize that both companies are going out of their way to rub Sony's nose in crap to make this all a bit fun. Whether Sony will respond to the ribbing by finally unlocking its garden remains to be seen.

In the meantime, though, this is a great example of advertising as content.

Filed Under: advertising as content, content as advertising, crossplay, games, openness, ps4, sharing, trolling, xbox
Companies: microsofty, nintendo, sony