Sony blocking Cross-Play for Profit?

With recent announcements that Minecraft will allow cross-play between all the platforms and Rocket League for the Switch also announcing that it’ll feature cross-play, Sony has made a strange decision and have blocked cross-play on their platforms. The reasoning behind this decision is very weak and quite frankly, not a smart one but what do we “players” know.

In an interview with Eurogamer, PlayStation global sales and marketing head Jim Ryan had this to say, “We’ve got to be mindful of our responsibility to our install base”, he says. “Minecraft – the demographic playing that, you know as well as I do, it’s all ages but it’s also very young. We have a contract with the people who go online with us, that we look after them and they are within the PlayStation curated universe. Exposing what in many cases are children to external influences we have no ability to manage or look after, it’s something we have to think about very carefully.”

Now that’s a somewhat reasonable excuse but even Nintendo, of all the companies, is fine with it and when that was pointed it, he said, “Yeah, that’s true. Everybody has to take their own decisions. We’ll do that. Like I say, we have no philosophical stance against cross-play at all.”

Is it really though?

There might not be any philosophical stances but there seem to be quite a bit of legal stances regarding this. One of the reasons I feel that Sony has made this decision is because they know people are buying PlayStations more than the other consoles and they know they have the lead in the market. With cross-play available on the other platforms, Sony could also be afraid that people might choose the other platforms because hey, someone on the Xbox can now play with someone on the PlayStation so why buy a PlayStation? Another reason for this could be that their network infrastructure might not be up to standard and will cost them quite a bit to fix just to have the ability to cross-play. These are all speculations from my end considering that PS4 Rocket League players can play with PC players so what’s stopping them now? We might not get a definite answer but what we know is that Sony seems to be getting cocky and are choosing “for the players” rather than letting the players choose for themselves.

Let us know what you think about this whole debacle of cross-play and why you think Sony might be doing this by leaving your comments.

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