Over the past year, Sony has dealt with a lot of controversy surrounding cross-play. At first they were criticized for not allowing it at all while Microsoft and Nintendo were getting friendly with each other. Now, even after that policy has shifted to allow cross-play, the feature has been rolled out across PS4 games quite slowly, with Fortnite and Rocket League being the only titles to support it.
Cross-play has not become as prevalent on PS4 as many were hoping, so Sony’s Shawn Layden was questioned about it in a recent interview with GameInformer. According to him, Sony is supposedly “open for business” and is only waiting on game developers to step up and implement it into their games.
“We got to that place in Fortnite and it seems to be going reasonably well, from what I can tell…People keep saying, ‘Why doesn’t Sony allow more people to have it?’ We’re open for business on this one,” Layden told GameInformer. “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.”
He then stated that there isn’t any “gating factor” regarding cross-play right now; unfortunately, Shawn Layden has since been called out by the CEO of Wargroove developer Chucklefish on ResetEra for that statement being false. According to Chucklefish’s CEO, who goes by Tiy on ResetEra, the developer looked to implement PS4 cross-play into Wargroove, going through the steps Shawn listed, and were still told no.
“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,” Chucklefish’s CEO posted on ResetEra. “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.”
Apparently, it is currently possible for Chucklefish to “*literally* toggle a switch and have it working, so while “policy work might be more complicated for Sony,” it doesn’t seem to be a matter of developers not asking like Shawn Layden told GameInformer. Of course, this could be an isolated case or misunderstanding, but it definitely doesn’t look good for Sony to contradict themselves when discussing cross-play.
For those of you who want to try cross-play with Wargroove, it is currently possible between PC, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The lack of cross-play also doesn’t seem to be too damaging for the Advanced Wars inspired strategy title made back its development costs in only three days.
The post Shawn Layden’s Comments on PS4 Cross-Play Clash with Wargoove Developer’s Experience by Tomas Franzese appeared first on DualShockers.