Sony blocks Rocket League cross-platform play on PS4. It's the "push of a button" away says Psyonix
Rocket League PS4 cross-platform play blocked by Sony, because somebody needs to think of the children.
During the Nintendo Spotlight: E3 2017 presentation yesterday, Rocket League was announced for the Switch and in equally exciting news, cross-play between PC and consoles was also revealed. Except for the PS4 that is.
A similar issues popped up following Minecraft's cross-play announcement when we found out that Sony had refused to participate and Microsoft aren't missing the opportunity to take a jab at Sony.
"First Minecraft and now RocketLeague love seeing gamers unite across devices!" tweeted Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg.
Talking to Polygon, VP of publishing at Psyonix, Jeremy Dunham, said, "The honest answer is PlayStation has not yet granted us permission."
Dunham describes cross-platform play as "the future of the industry" and is hoping that 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."
Everything is ready to go on Sony's agreement.
"We run all the servers. The way that it works is we connect everyone through our own system, we handle everything ourselves... I can tell you this: From Psyonix, we would do whatever we would need to do to make it possible to be cross-network play with all the other platforms and PlayStation 4. They just need to tell us what that is."
He added, "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. That’s all we need to do."
Eurogamer spoke to PlayStation global sales and marketing head Jim Ryan to get further clarification from the source, and frankly, the possibility of Sony getting on board isn't looking good.
"We've done [cross-platform play] in the past. We're always open to conversations with any developer or publisher who wants to talk about it. 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," he explained.
He touched on the responsibility of protecting younger players, and when asked if they would ever change their stance, he replied, "I don't think anything is ever a done deal. Anybody who is dogmatic in that manner is typically a fool. That said, to my knowledge, there is no live conversation ongoing at the moment."
What are your thoughts on Sony's refusal to play nice? Let us know in the comments below.