Phil Spencer and Reggie Fils-Aime both disagree with Sony‘s closed approach towards cross-play.

We rarely see that two of the three console manufacturers stand behind a common goal, but that is the case right now: Fortnite, which launched this week on the Nintendo Switch, supports cross-play even between the Switch and the Xbox One. Meanwhile, it turns out that if you played Fortnite just once on PlayStation 4, then tried to log in on the Switch, couldn’t do so. Sony’s stocks dropped by 2% because of it, which wasn’t helped by their statement regarding the Fortnite-debacle either.

Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, told the following to GiantBomb: „If you bought your son, your child, an Xbox, and I bought my child a PlayStation – and I’m just a parent, it’s their birthday, whatever – and the kids want to play Fortnite, and they all of a sudden go home and can’t play with each other… it doesn’t feel like it helps the consumers. If it doesn’t help the developers and it doesn’t help the consumer, then it doesn’t feel like it helps to grow gaming to me.

I get the business side of it, and I’m not going to judge anybody else making their decisions because they’ve got to run their business… Our goal is to be relevant and important to every gamer on the planet. If people want to go buy someone else’s console and play games there, great, as long as we’re all leaning in to how do we make this business for everybody as vibrant as possible.”

Reggie Fils-Aime, the president of Nintendo of America, told Polygon his thoughts: „You have companies like mine that encourage cross-play and enable cross-play. You have a developer and content owner that wants cross-play and is encouraging cross-play, and then you have the other platform holders and what it is that they do… and when it comes to other platform holders, as much as you have the influence on other platform holders, I don’t. And that’s a decision that each of them are making, and some are supporting cross-play, and some are not.”

Fortnite has over 127 million players at the moment, with two million in just a single day already coming from the Switch…

Source: GamesIndustry