This week Andy Mcnamara from Game Informer sat down for a softball interview with Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden. The two discuss a few topics regarding the Playstation and games, but at the end of the interview Mcnamara brings up the topic of cross-play. Layden’s response? All publishers have to do is ask.
“People keep saying, “Why doesn’t Sony allow more people to have it?” 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. 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.”
A great response, except it’s still a complete falsehood. Chucklefish’s CEO chimed in on the issue in a ResetEra thread noting that the developer did exactly what Layden suggested; they asked their account manager. The manager’s response? In no uncertain terms, absolutely not.
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.
Meanwhile Nintendo and Microsoft have just recently struck a deal that will see Xbox Live come to the Nintendo Switch.
Source: ResetEra
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