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Sony's Jim Ryan defends position on cross-platform play

Both Rocket League and Minecraft devs expressed willingness to adopt feature.

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This week the teams behind two big games have been banging the drum for cross-platform play, with Rocket League and Minecraft devs merging their communities, bringing together PC, Xbox One, and now Switch players. There is, of course, one name missing from that last.

Sony has repeatedly resisted calls to allow cross-platform play, last year when the debate surrounding Rocket League started, and again this week with the news that Switch players will be joining the cross-platform party, and before that when Sony refused the offer to go cross-platform with Minecraft via the Better Together update.

Psyonix's Jeremy Dunham has since said to Polygon that "we would do whatever we would need to do to make it possible to be cross-network play with all the other platforms and PlayStation 4. They just need to tell us what that is." He added that it would be as easy as pushing a metaphorical button.

Sony, however, isn't to be moved on the matter, with global sales and marketing chief Jim Ryan saying as much to Eurogamer:

"It's certainly not a profound philosophical stance we have against this. We've done it in the past. We're always open to conversations with any developer or publisher who wants to talk about it."

Ryan also added some reasoning for Minecraft in particular, suggesting that there's a child protection issue:

"We've got to be mindful of our responsibility to our install base. 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."

Given the mostly friendly and very public competition between PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, it'll come as no surprise to hear that various Microsoft devs, including Aaron Greenburg, have come out to say just how much they love the feature: "First @Minecraft and now @RocketLeague love seeing gamers unite across devices! #GamersFirst"

Do you think PlayStation 4 players would like to play with people on Xbox One and Switch, and is cross-platform play the future for big third-party titles?

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