There’s a lot of speculation about the next generation of consoles. What kind of tech are we talking about? Who’s going to ‘win?’ Will PS5 be able to keep up its predecessor’s streak? All of this is up in the air, but according to Tim Sweeney, one thing is for sure: everyone’s going to be playing together. Cross-platform gaming is the way of the future.
Now, a lot of us in the industry are going to be super sceptical about that, and understandably so. After all, you just can’t get away from all of the my console’s better than your console pettiness. Back when we were kids in the schoolyards of the 90s, we’d have nothing short of pitched battles over Mario vs Sonic, Nintendo vs Sega, SNES vs Genesis.
The names and the battlefields may have changed, but other than that, we really haven’t come very far. Just look through your average YouTube comment section, in just about any gaming-related video. The fury, the snark, the petty one-upsmanship…
The question is, why are we still partying like it’s 1999? Can’t Xbox gamers and PlayStation gamers just get along? Can’t PC players get down from their lofty easychairs too, and just acknowledge that we’re all gamers, and we’re all just gaming? Let’s bury that hatchet, and enjoy a glorious new era of cross-platform gaming.
According to Epic Games (of Gears of War and Fortnite fame) founder Tim Sweeney, we can. We must. We inevitably will. At GDC, he went as far as to say that it’s just a matter of time.
“For Sony and Microsoft to support their customers well they have to be open to all their customer’s friends – their real world friends – otherwise they’re breaking up real-world social groups,” he said. “…do you expect this platform schism to divide them into two separate groups that can’t play together? No. It’s got to come together now.”
For Sweeney, video games are first and foremost a social experience, akin to social media. The whole point of Twitter, Instagram, FaceBook and the like is their ability to connect people, and gaming is shutting out a vast section of the experience in this way. Some of the biggest and most popular online multiplayer games are multi-platform, of course, but it’s a never the twain shall meet sort of deal.
Why? Partly because PlayStation and Xbox just don’t want to cooperate. As the debate surrounding Fortnite’s cross-platform play (which was supposedly enabled ‘by accident’ and then disabled) demonstrated last September.
Heck, Nintendo are starting to embrace the idea. Switch titles like Rocket League are fully equipped to play with other platforms. There are technical issues around this foot-dragging from Sony and Microsoft too, granted, but at its core, it’s something that the two long-time rivals are going to have to level with. As the gaming landscape changes dramatically, they’re going to need each other more and more.
That’s Sweeney’s view, and it’s a tough one to argue against.