Cross platform gameplay (Gaming)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Monday, June 26, 2017, 19:46 (2505 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Rocket League and cross platform play

Hopefully that takes you to an article about cross platform gameplay. It's focused on Rocket League, but still interesting.

I don't know why Bungie doesn't sidestep this issue entirely by having your character platform agnostic. They are stored on the bungie.net servers… and any platform can connect to bungie.net… get it? So while you might not be able to do a raid with someone on PS4 when you are on XB1, at least you could take your character.

You don't think Sony and Activision's promotional agreements specifically prohibit this?

There may not be a feature-parity agreement, but there functionally appears to be a content one; Sony gets its own time-exclusive content (so timed as to drop on Xbox long past it being remotely relevant to the game) and the Xbox platform gets nothing Sony doesn't get. Almost as if it was an obligation.

I'd push someone to answer whether or not Bungie could and would be allowed to enable cross-platform PVE play between PC and Xbox. There's only one platform holder to please there, Microsoft. Forget issues of fairness, let's presume nobody cares.

Could Bungie do that if they wanted to?

If they don't, why don't they want to? Is protecting issues like the integrity of strike scoring really worth preventing people from playing together and having fun, or at least migrating characters between two MS platforms, or being platform-agnostic with regard to characters on Xbox and PC?

I'm guessing Bungie won't do this because they can't. I'm guessing it is because Sony gets to have everything Bungie can offer, and MS is not allowed to get anything Sony does not have.

Since Sony does not want cross-platform anything as that only helps competing platform-owners, Bungie cannot give to MS what Sony does not want for itself.

That's my theory.