A couple years ago you’d have to torture me to hear something bad about Game Pass. “It’s the best value in gaming!” I’d scream while you dump gallons of water onto a rag covering my face, “It’s the industry’s greatest tool for discoverability!” Now I’m older and angrier, hardened by the pain and hardships of writing about video games for a living. You barely have to twist my arm to get me to talk shit about the things I used to like. I’m not afraid to give God of War Ragnarok a four out of five no matter how many weird nerds tweet at me about it, and I’m not afraid to say that Game Pass isn’t perfect. The total lack of big first-party games from Microsoft is getting harder and harder to overlook, the rotating library diminishes the service’s long-term value, and most frustrating of all, the inconsistency of crossplay is starting to become a deal breaker. I haven’t canceled my subscription yet, but if one more highly-anticipated multiplayer game shows up without crossplay, I just might.
The most recent game to whiff on crossplay is Darktide, a Left 4 Dead-style co-op shooter from the Vermintide 2 team - one of my favorite multiplayer games. Darktide does not support PC crossplay, meaning if I’m playing on PC through Game Pass while my friends purchased it through Steam, we cannot play together. Many games have had this exact same problem, including Back 4 Blood, Lemnis Gate, Dark Alliance, The Ascent, Human Fall Flat, Gunfire Reborn, and many, many more.
This lack of PC crossplay among Game Pass titles is frequently affecting my friend group. Every time a new multiplayer game comes out, we have to collectively decide if we’re going to play it on Game Pass or buy it on Steam, and Steam consistently wins out for a few reasons. For one thing, it’s just nice to have all of your games in one library, and we’ve been building our Steam libraries for decades. There’s also a peace of mind of knowing once we buy it it will always be there, unlike Game Pass, which frequently rotates games off the service. No one wants to invest time progressing in a game only to have to restart when Microsoft arbitrarily removes it from Game Pass someday, so to be safe we just play on Steam.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind just playing Darktide on Game Pass and buying it through the Xbox app if one day Game Pass drops it. It will probably be on discount at that point anyway, so it feels like a win-win. Without PC crossplay, however, that isn’t even an option. It is absurd that an entire group of Game Pass subscribers feels like they have to buy a Game Pass game on Steam for full price, but it happens all the time.
Clearly, crossplay is not always a priority for developers. Fatshark has said it will come to Darktide eventually, and it has come to other games post-launch too. I can only imagine that it takes significant time and resources to support PC crossplay and many games are choosing to put their energy into other things, only getting to crossplay when they have time later, or in most cases, never at all. I don’t think that’s an excuse for excluding what I consider to be a core feature, and I don’t think Microsoft should certify any game that doesn’t have it at launch.
The lack of crossplay, and in particular PC crossplay - which should never be treated like multiple platforms - is hurting Game Pass. For multiplayer games, Game Pass is best used as a demo service to try things out before buying them on Steam where you know you’ll always be able to play with your friends. Failing to offer crossplay should be a rare exception that developers are apologetic about as they rush to make it happen, but it feels like most Game Pass releases outside of major triple-As don’t have it at launch.
Game Pass is a phenomenal service for smaller multiplayer games because the service is a great middle ground between two highly risky monetization models. Free-to-play games often don’t get popular fast enough to support studios, while buy-to-play multiplayer games have a high cost of entry for groups of friends that may not all enjoy it. Game Pass sits perfectly in the middle as a paid service that makes you feel like you’re playing games for free. Without basic network features, however, you’re getting an inferior version of these games when you play them on Game Pass. There shouldn’t need to be an asterisk next to Game Pass games - if they can’t launch with crossplay, they shouldn’t be on Game Pass at all.