Bethesda Threatens Sony for Preventing Cross-Platform Play
- Mehedi Hassan
- Aug 14, 2018
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Sony faced a lot of controversies when Fortnite launched on the Nintendo Switch. The company didn’t let PlayStation users carry on their progress, as well as their purchased items from Fortnite on PlayStation 4 to the Switch. Some players even had trouble connecting their account on the Switch. All of that because of the fact that Sony doesn’t allow cross-play on the PlayStation.
And someone is finally pressing Sony to open up its platform and allow cross-play experiences. Bethesda, one of the biggest game publishers in the industry, may not release its next game on PS4 if Sony doesn’t meet its requirements. The game we are talking about here is The Elder Scrolls: Legends, and it’s been available on mobile platforms and Steam for a while, with a console launch expected to happen soon. “It is our intention in order for the game to come out, it has to be those things [cross-play and cross platform] on any system. We cannot have a game that works one way across everywhere else except for on this one thing,” said Pete Hines, Bethesda’s SVP of global marketing and communications, in an interview with Game Informer.
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Hines isn’t mentioning Sony directly but said Bethesda’s terms are non-negotiable. “We can’t be talking about one version of Legends, where you take your progress with you, and another version where you stay within that ecosystem or its walled off from everything else. That is counter to what the game has been about,” Hines said.
Sony has been under pressure to embrace cross-platform for a while. Both Microsoft and Nintendo have been supporting cross-play, and the duo even teamed up to promote cross-play during all the Sony and Fortnite cross-play drama. Of course, whether Sony embraces cross-play depends on everyone else in the industry. PlayStation still represents a huge portion of the market, and game publishers don’t really want to miss out on the PS4 customer base. Still, companies like Bethesda putting pressure on Sony to enable cross-play could work out at the end. Whether Bethesda will take the same approach for much bigger console titles remains to be seen, however.