The gaming industry is in an incredibly awkward place right now, stuck between the old hardware sales system by pushing exclusives and the new reality of players expecting their entertainment to travel with them on different platforms.
Today, the walls between the PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo and PC gaming ecosystems have never been thinner, but this has led to some unexpected problems. Nowhere is the tension more obvious than the issue of cross-play and cross-game support.
This is an increasingly frustrating issue
Cross game is when you play a game on a console or computer and you can play against people on another platform. Cross-rescue is when your game progress and equipment can be accessed across multiple platforms. So if you get to level five in a game on your phone and start playing that game on the Switch, cross-rescue assistance means you’ll be level five there too. If you can invite someone who plays on Xbox to join, that means the game has cross games. Makes sense?
The problem is that implementing these ideas is almost always more complicated than expected.
take Destiny 2, a free game. The cross game will take place at the end of this year, and you can now connect accounts to enable cross-save. This way you can play on the PC and then choose where you stayed on the PlayStation 5, but you can’t play against anyone on the PC while you’re on the PlayStation 5 – at least not yet. What if you have an extension on one platform, but want to move to another platform? Good luck, as the mission content in each expansion can only be played on the platform you paid for, even if your seasonal subscription can be used anywhere. It’s confusing as hell!
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Then you have Outriders, which offers crossover games (although it was a buggy at launch), allowing you to play with your friends on different consoles. It’s also free with Game Pass, though not on PC if you have Ultimate Game Pass. There’s also support for cross-saving between generations of consoles, so gamers starting on PlayStation 4 can move their character to a possible PlayStation 5, and Xbox One gamers can do the same when they receive an Xbox Series X, but in there is currently no way to move progress from one platform to another.
The future Diablo 2: Risen will also provide cross-rescue so you can play on your home computer and then take the game on the road if you have a Nintendo Switch. However, cross-play is not supported at all, so you will still not be able to play with friends on other consoles.
Cross games and cross-rescue are becoming more and more popular, but it is not always clear how each game uses these terms and what will or will not be allowed. When Fortnite released on Nintendo Switch, no one realized that accounts that played on PlayStation 4 could not be used at all on Switch and you could be blocked from playing on PlayStation 4 if you had already used that account on Switch. In this case, players found out that they could no longer play on at least one of their systems based on a rule they were not told existed until it was too late.
Then it is Warframe, which allows you to bring your PC account to Switch, but you can only do this once and it basically splits your account in two. Once you have made the leap, the progress you make on the Switch will not be transferred back to your PC or vice versa.
When do you find a game that works with both cross-play and cross-rescue, allowing you to bring characters and progress from platform to platform as you play against anyone else on the other consoles? It’s an absolute bliss, even in games that don’t set the world on fire.
Will it ever improve?
Yes. The situation of cross-play and cross-rescue has already improved substantially since the early days of the games, when each console was a garden with completely secure walls and there were no overlaps between players or progression between them.
Those walls have fallen apart and will continue to fall apart. To be able to play War zone against my friends on the computer when I’m on the Xbox Series X and if I saved the progress in the account and not in the console is something that would have been inconceivable a few years ago.
Other forms of entertainment are not distributed in gardens built in the same way. Imagine that the Netflix subscription only works on certain TVs, or the Kindle app doesn’t keep track of you if you’re switching from iOS to Android. You can almost think of services like Netflix or Disney Plus as your own consoles, but the admission price is the subscription fee, not hundreds of dollars for a box next to your TV.
Video games, as a business, are based on specialized hardware that has never been meant to be profitable on its own; the sale of games and digital content is integrated into the business strategy. This is a problem if each game becomes playable on any platform, and progress and purchases are blocked on a player’s account, not on the platform. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo do not sell you hardware, they sell you a store and there is a very good reason why Walmart does not allow you to change something bought from Amazon.
That’s why Microsoft is trying to overtake the package by focusing on services instead of hardware, and surprisingly, Microsoft’s Game Pass is already the service that most closely resembles Netflix. If Sony still doesn’t feel the pressure to match the Microsoft features on the Game Pass with its own PlayStation Now offering, it will be soon.
Anyone who realizes the best way to get players what they want will have a considerable advantage over everyone else, although, by definition, every major company will have to learn to work together to some extent if crossover games and rescue must become standard.
As these companies try to figure it out, however, expect the confusion to continue and make sure you do a lot of homework before making an assumption about what those words mean. This is a time of transition for the industry and things are moving in the right direction, but for now this temporary mess is still a mess.