Sony Boss: PS4 is “Open for Business” on Cross-Play, Some Devs Claim They Were Told No

While the issue of cross-play multiplayer for hardware consoles between Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo has been an ongoing issue for several console generations, the involved parties have finally come to terms recently and have been allowing select games to have the feature.

Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden recently spoke to Game Informer and noted while cross-play is currently in beta on PlayStation 4, the service is available to all developers and there “isn’t any gating factor” to enabling the feature.


“We got to that place in Fortnite and it seems to be going reasonably well, from what I can tell. The Rocket League light up will happen soon. People keep saying, ‘Why doesn’t Sony allow more people to have it?’ We’re open for business on this one,” Layden said.

He added, “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.”

Chucklefish CEO Finn Brice later added (via ResetEra) that they requested crossplay for the PS4 version of the recently launched strategy game Wargroove right up to release, and were told “in no uncertain terms” that it was “not going to happen.” He added they can “literally toggle a switch and have it working,” but was unsure of how complicated it is on Sony’s end.

Wargroove is now available for Windows PC, Xbox One, and Switch, with a PlayStation 4 release coming “soon.” In case you missed it, you can find our review for the game here (we highly recommend it!).

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