In the recent months, Sony has appeared to begin their support of cross-play.
After having to be pushed by fans to support Fortnite cross-play far after Xbox, Nintendo, and PC had implemented the system, Sony finally announced cross-play support for the game. It was a big win for gamers, and it seemed that Sony was finally going to bring cross-play to not only Fortnite, but other games as well.
In an article with Game Informer, Sony’s Shawn Layden discussed PS4’s support of cross-play.
“We’re open for business on this one. 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.”
According to Shawn Layden, PS4 is open to and ready for more games to use cross-play on PS4.
However, CEO of Chucklefish, publishers of Stardew Valley and Wargroove, took issue with Layden’s statements on cross-play.
“Hi all,
CEO Of Chucklefish here, we just launched Wargroove with crossplay between PC, Switch and Xbox so I wanted to chime in.
We made many requests for crossplay (both through our account manager and directly with higher ups) all the way up until release month. We were told in no uncertain terms that it was not going to happen.
From our side, we can *literally* toggle a switch and have it working. Of course policy work might be more complicated for Sony.Just wanted to provide some balance on the issue and say that it certainly isn’t a question of developers having not contacted their account managers or having dropped the ball. We were told no.”
According to this message, it seems that Sony is still continuing to bottleneck cross-play behind the scenes. If this is true (and it probably is due to Sony’s poor record on cross-play support), then it continues to show the true nature of Sony’s “support” of cross-play.
Neither Sony nor Shawn Layden have responded to Chucklefish’s claims as of yet.