The latest drama to come out of E3 2017 is less loathsome and more entertaining than that surrounding The Last Night by a mile, featuring sniping Sony and Xbox execs in a battle of words over Minecraft and Rocket League cross-platform play.
Minecraft and Rocket League are two of the biggest games in the world. Cross-platform play for Minecraft includes Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PC, mobile and VR players, while Rocket League cross-platform play includes Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Steam. However, you’ll note PlayStation 4’s conspicuous absence from these collaborative ventures.
Whose fault is it that Sony won’t include the PlayStation 4 in Rocket League and Minecraft cross-platform play? Microsoft says it’s Sony:
“[W]e are still in discussions with Sony about PlayStation and have nothing to confirm at this point. We would love to work with Sony to bring players on PlayStation 4 into our united ecosystem as well,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Polygon.
Rocket League dev Psyonix confirmed that cross-play with Sony was something Psyonix could easily do on their end.
VP of publishing Jeremy Dunham said , “It’s literally something we could do with a push of a button, metaphorically. In reality it’s a web page with a checkbox on it. All we have to do is check that box and it would be up and running in less than an hour all over the world.”
Unfortunately, Sony keeps saying “no” – or at least keeps not saying “yes.”
“The honest answer is PlayStation has not yet granted us permission. We are hopeful that being able to play cross network is still something we can go for, we think we’ve been big champions of this for the last two years trying to get people behind the idea,” said Dunham. “We believe it’s the future of the industry, and we’re hopeful that maybe the community and the media can actually help get around the idea of pushing it forward and doing what we can to make it reality. It’s our dream.”
So what’s Sony’s holdup ? In an interview with Eurogamer, Sony Global Sales and Marketing head Jim Ryan gave a baffling excuse: it’s all to protect the children, see.
“We've got to be mindful of our responsibility to our install base. Minecraft - the demographic playing 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 look after them and they are within the PlayStation curated universe. Exposing what in many cases are children to external influences we have no ability to manage or look after, it's something we have to think about very carefully.”
The Eurogamer interviewer pointed out, quite rightly, that Nintendo – famous for the efforts it takes to protect children online didn’t seem to have a problem with cross-play, to which Ryan only said, “Yeah, that's true. Everybody has to take their own decisions. We'll do that.”
While Ryan repeated several times that Sony had “no philosophical stance against cross-play at all,” he also stated that to his knowledge, there was no active conversation about crossplay happening currently. The real reason seems to be that Sony just doesn’t want to play with others.
“Unfortunately it's a commercial discussion between ourselves and other stakeholders, and I'm not going to get into the detail of that on this particular instance,” said Ryan, which seems like a far more reasonable answer than some insulting pablum about the children.
In an interview with Giant Bomb on night 2 of the site’s E3 livestreams, Xbox head Phil Spencer bristled at the implication that Microsoft was somehow putting the children at risk.
“The fact that somebody would kind of make an assertion that somehow we’re not keeping Minecraft players safe, I found — not only from a Microsoft perspective, but from a game industry perspective — like, I don’t know why that has to become the dialogue,” said Spencer. “Like, that doesn’t seem healthy for anyone.”
“We take the safety of Xbox Live, of our players across all of our games — inside of Minecraft , obviously an incredibly important part of that — it’s incredibly important to our team,” Spencer added. “We would never put Minecraft in a place where we felt like [...] we weren’t keeping our players safe.”
It turns out that Minecraft at least uses Microsoft’s Xbox Live service to power cross-platform online play from Xbox One to the Switch.
“All those involved in this, all platform owners have been very pragmatic and understand that what we want to do is create a good experience for the players. So we needed a good system to collect everyone - and Xbox Live is a good system,” said Mojang CEO Jonas Märtensson in an interview with Norwegian site Pressfire.
Maybe Sony’s got sour grapes? Feeling spurned? Either way, at least Nintendo and Xbox are cooperating to make a better gaming world for their customers. It’d be nice if Sony clued in and shared the sandbox, too.
