Ever since I was young, I’ve really enjoyed using gaming as a means to take on very different type of challenges, ones that breach the barriers of reality and open the doors to new experiences and a different level of story telling that movies and other entertainment medium can not match.

Whilst I have always been a huge advocate of games that focus on a deep, immersive single player experience, gaming has also always been a great way to bond and fire up a bit of friendly competitiveness between friends and even family.

I still have really fond memories of having my friends & family sat round the television playing local multiplayer games, games like Mario Kart 64 and, who can forget, the massively entertaining golden gun mode on GoldenEye!

And even though, at that time, network play hadn’t really hit the mainstream for consoles, I do remember running and attending all-night LAN parties between interconnected PCs, playing games like Command & Conquer, Grand Theft Auto and Counter Strike.

No matter the means of sharing those experiences, there was one key commonality, it was great to be able to utilise gaming as a medium to open the door to worlds that would create shared memories and bonds through a love of gaming.

Fast forward to today, my passion for gaming hasn’t faded, and whilst I unfortunately haven’t got a “man cave” to have a gaming PC, I have always owned at least one gaming console for those couch gaming sessions.

My primary console at the time of writing is a PlayStation 4 Pro, and this is what leads me to writing this post.

With a lot of my friends not living close by and in a lot of cases, overseas, I like to try to take the time to continue to share my gaming sessions with them, in the form of online multiplayer.

At the time of writing, however, a significant barrier exists to being able to share gaming sessions on my favourite games with some of my friends, and this all stems down to “cross-platform play“.

One of my favourite online multiplayer games, Rocket League supports cross-platform play between pretty much all the devices it is on… except PlayStation devices.

For those who don’t really follow gaming news, for a while now, there has been pressure on Sony to open the door to allowing cross-platform play on their devices. The blocker to cross-platform play on PlayStation is NOT technical, it’s policy being enforced by Sony, Psyonix (The creators of Rocket League) has even said it has working netcode for Rocket League that enables cross-platform play on the PlayStation 4 and they are just waiting for Sony to allow it.

Following E3 in 2017, when this whole issue came into the spotlight, an interview with Jim Ryan (SIE Worldwide Studios and Head of Global Sales and Marketing for Sony) seemed to indicate it was to do with protecting the platform’s younger / more vulnerable gamers.

But with Nintendo, who are normally well-known for their younger install base, fully embracing cross-platform play, I don’t really buy this reasoning. If I was the cynical type, I could reason it is perhaps a fear that enabling cross-platform play would hurt hardware sales with the knowledge they could still share gaming experiences from other hardware not produced by Sony.

However, I want to really believe that Sony, who since the reveal of the PlayStation 4 have used the tag line “This is for the Players“, do really care about what their gamers want and are perhaps missing the fact they are being needlessly over-protective of their install base, especially those falling outside of the younger install base.

If you were to ask “the players” what they truly wanted from Sony, I suspect the answer would be quite loud and clear, the choice to share their online gaming sessions on their favourite games with others, irrespective of platform.

PlayStation 4 already has Family focused accounts and parental controls, and if the concern of protecting the younger install base is accurate, then why not utilise that framework to enable / disable cross-platform play, rather than penalise their whole install base?

However, if the decision is more political than that, and does stem from concerns of sales of hardware… I challenge Sony to realise that gaming is evolving, as gaming hardware becomes more synonymous with PC hardware, it will become less about what is under the hood and more about the platform, it’s capabilities and first party games, that will drive decisions on what hardware to buy.

Preventing cross-platform play will only help but tarnish a reputation that is supposedly focused on putting the “player” first, and the sooner this is realised, the less damage will be done. The biggest problem? This will only continue to emphasised by popular games embracing cross=platform play, like the hugely successful Fortnite franchise, which aims to connect all players irrespective of device, well that is, except unwillingly for PlayStation devices.

Sony, it’s time for you to truly realise your statement of intent, and do what is right for your “players” and finally deliver the cross-platform play we are all eager for.