Crossplay: The Arguement

 Bridge the hardware gap

Today I want to ask you a question. Are gamers not entitled to the platform of their choice? No, says the antiquated soldiers of the long-abandoned consoles wars; that choice is in the hands of loyalty. No says crafters of convoluted exclusivity contracts; your choice lies where we say it does. No says the mad hermits over at Google; console gaming is dead, play our terminally-ill gaming platform instead. The relentless march of technological advancement has rejected those ultimatums; instead it has produced a different direction. It produced the impossible. It produced... Crossplay. A system wherein player of games would no longer be split from their friends on the account of which lump of plastic they game on. A state wherein gaming in the multiplayer spectrum is no longer hindered by the petty constraints of stuffy-suit bureaucrats and their narrow world view. And with the cooperation of one last stubborn holdout, universal Crossplay can be our default way of life too.

It seems almost pastiche and uninspired to say how much I, personally, support the idea of Crossplay across our gaming spectrum; because it's such a default stance on the world to take. It's like saying that I support the concept of oxygen, I think the sun is bright, water is wet. ("Do you support students?") No great revelation seems to come from considering the benefits of a world with Crossplay. And yet there's resistance. Like windmills trying to hold back a tornado, pointless roadblocks are thrown up against a force of nature that will, at the end of the day, be the standard way that onlineplay is handled in the future. Some out there fight tooth and nail against what will be, and I just do not understand it at a deeply fundamental level. So I'm going to do something productive about it. I'm going to play the Devil's advocate for a second, thrown myself in the alleged minds of these fanatical killjoys and try to come to some sort of sensible accord for what it is they believe in that precludes a world of crossplay. (Besides, you know, money.)

So of course I'm talking about Sony as I'm being all coy over here, and the ridiculous way that in the face of an industry bending backwards to accommodate folk who want to play with each other over the console boundary lines, Sony have been stamping their feet into the dirt like the decision lies solely with them. Recently it was revealed (through the Epic lawsuit) how Sony is the only console company charging through the nose to include Crossplay, sparking controversy at the draconian lunacy of such policies. Sure, Sony, you're currently the biggest Console company on the market right now, bully for you, but this is a matter of systemic change, in a creative industry fuelled by change. You start getting into you head that "old is gold" and stop adapting with the time and the industry will leave you behind as it has done with so many others that have failed to adapt. Even Nintendo found themselves in trouble when trying to die on a similar hill, learn from the folly of others! But maybe I'm being reductive and there's a good point hidden somewhere in their garbled nonsense, let's take a gander.

A big excuse I hear a lot for why Sony is against Crossplay sounds so bitterly like 'Press Event talk' but I'm going to throw it the ol' 'benefit of the doubt' anyway. "It's about safety". Yes, apparently Playstation won't allow for people to play across the isle because those are ecosystems entirely out of Playstation's purview and thus they can't ensure the all-important 'safety' of their own players. (Of course, this plays off of the pearl clutching of a million clueless parents across the world and so sounds nice enough on headlines.) And from the basic interpretation their logic seems sound. Sony spend at least some of their time cultivating an ecosystem that's safe for it's players, and it would be a betrayal of that philosophy to then throw those players outside that carefully curated bubble of perfect safety. (Safety in this case, I assume, meaning the ability to play games without being shouted at from a 10 years old's basement) 

Except, no they don't. Playstation implement no more rules then any other company regarding who can play their games, with the vast majority of their 'protection and enforcement' being entirely reactionary and based on 'reporting'. Actually, that's probably less work than Nintendo do, because Nintendo has the whole 'family friendly' persona that they have to maintain in order to keep their playerbase running. Heck, Nintendo doesn't even allow for voicechat in a lot of their first party games, and yet they've supported Crossplay for those developers that had broached the topic to them. And even if what Sony says about 'safety' was to be taken genuinely; Playstation would only be entering a Crossplay relationship with the other three major platforms for gaming anyway, most of which have a vested interest in staying somewhat safe and clean so that players keep playing on them. It's not as though Sony's being asked to link net-code with some diseased crappy console like the Ouya, making them vulnerable to all sorts of potential security breaches or unruly player bases. You're already working in the sterilised ward, stop pretending you're so much holier than all that.

There's another argument, and this one doesn't technically stem just from Sony themselves, as such it has something off a point. Miss matching hardware is a genuine concern when we're talking about Crossplay because different consoles are capable of running the relatively same software at their own performance levels and the question becomes how can one retain a fair mulitplayer experience when someone out there could be running a beefier rig which perhaps pulls in more frames than you can on your home console. It's a genuine concern that developers have been struggling with for a quite a while now and there's no single suit-all answer. Sometimes it's just about creating separate competitive lobbies so that those who care can ensure they're only playing those of the same console when it matters. Sometimes there's some artificial throttling on the server side to level things out. There are solutions, but they're mostly out of the hands of the console developers themselves. Does that make it, then, a good enough reason to opt out of the Crossplay movement absolutely? I'd say not. We've been working on it for a while and people seem to be happy with how it's turned out so far.

Then there's perhaps the biggest, and most honest, excuse for why one would seek to keep our gaming ecosystems separate; it makes money. Or that is to say, it aligns with Sony's self-imbued persona of a platform imbued with an exclusivity mantra. Sony has been establishing itself as the place to play games by going around and buying the best of the best to be their own exclusive pen of games, and only years after the fact are they even considering ports to the PC. (Still waiting on Persona 5) So doesn't it make sense that Sony are totally for putting their foot down and saying "Well if our exclusive games aren't enough to get you to buy a Playstation, maybe if we literally hold your friendship with other Playstation players hostage, you'll be inclined to pull the trigger." Is that a dirty tactic? undoubtedly, but does it work? I bet so. 

This was an experiment to see if I could see things from Sony's perspective but I guess it was a failure or I'm just too biased because I only ended up affirming my position. Crossplay is only to the benefit of the consumer and the game developers, opening up the pool of potential players and allowing for clean transitions between whenever that might be necessary. Maybe I want to play with my friends, maybe I want to update my copy of the game, Crossplay opens those doors for everyone to enjoy. Sony places themselves square in the middle of that relationship when they have no real reason to and are slowing making themselves everyone's enemy by doing so. Draconian brow-beating holds no place in creatively driven industries and unless we're looking to slowly lose our spark for creative ingenuity, idiocy like Sony's regressive Crossplay stance needs to be called upon and stamped out as soon as possible lest it festers anymore than it has. Also, bring out Persona 5 Royal on PC. (I will not stop asking.)