Cross-Platform Play

When Rocket League was released last year on the PS4 it came with cross platform play with PC players from the word go at launch.  Fast forward to today and we finally see the same feature added to the Xbox One version.  Earlier today, Psyonix, the team behind the game announced that at some point in the evening, depending where you are in the world, the 2 million or so Xbox One players of Rocket League will now also have the opportunity to test their skills against our gaming brothers and sisters playing on PC.

As the announcement was made, Jeremy Dunham, the Vice President of Psyonix shared his delight at finally being able to bring the Xbox One and Steam PC players closer together, he had the following to say.

We’re really excited to bring Xbox One and PC players closer together.  Cross-network play has been something that Xbox One gamers have been asking us for since the day we launched, and thanks to Microsoft’s new cross-network policies, we’re proud to give it to them.

For now at least it seems that cross-platform play is restricted to either PS4 to PC or Xbox One to PC, there is no mention as of yet if they will connect the Xbox One and the PS4 directly together, but this for me is what everyone wants to see and I do feel that it is only a matter of time before we see the walls of PSN and Xbox Live come tumbling down and gamers on both systems go head to head on Rocket League.  I think it's fair to assume that most gamers on both machines want this to happen, we are all pretty competitive when it comes to online play and I think taking on players on a different console would add an extra bit of spice to Rocket League's frantic matches.  But it can't stop there, cross-platform play in my opinion should become standard across all third party games, on all platforms

I play Pro Evo on the Xbox One a lot, its a great football game, I absolutely love it, but playing online can be a bit annoying, not because of terrible lag or dodgy connections but because of the severely under populated servers, getting a game sometimes can involve a bit of a wait in finding another player.  FIFA players don't suffer from the same problems when they search for games online because there is about twenty thousand times more people playing FIFA than there is playing Pro Evo.  This is where in my opinion cross-platform play would be massively benifical, if you could widen the pool of players that you play against by including gamers on other platforms, you would reduce the problem of under populated servers for games like Pro Evo and many many other titles too.

Look, this is a great move by Psyonix, but I think for the feature to really take off it's going to fall to one of the big boys to run with it.  It might take the next Call Of Duty or the next Battlefield of even the next FIFA to put this front and centre and use it as a selling point.  These games have some of the biggest multiplayer lobbies on either console and I honestly believe that if COD was released later this year with cross-platform support, it would sell twice as many copies, hell, I might even pick it up myself if that was the case and I'm not much of a COD fan at all.  I hope this takes off, I hope Microsoft and Sony give the fans on both systems what they want and get this sorted, even if only to let the annoying fan boys on both sides finally settle their argument.