One person might not be saying the truth – is it Shawn Layden, Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios’ chairman, or Finn Brice, the CEO of Chucklefish, who recently released Wargroove, a turn-based tactics game, similar to Advance Wars?

„We got to that place in Fortnite and it seems to be going reasonably well, from what I can tell. The Rocket League light up will happen soon. People keep saying, ‘Why doesn’t Sony allow more people to have it?’ We’re open for business on this one. All it takes is for publishers and developers who wish to permit it. As ever, just work with your PlayStation account manager, and they will walk you through the steps that we’ve learned through our partnership with Epic on how this works. I don’t believe right now there is any gating factor on that. I think they’re open to making proposals because the Fortnite thing worked pretty well,” Layden told GameInformer.

„Hi all, […] we made many requests for cross-play (both through our account manager and directly with higher-ups) all the way up until release month. We were told in no uncertain terms that it was not going to happen. From our side, we can *literally* toggle a switch and have it working. Of course, policy work might be more complicated for Sony. [I] just wanted to provide some balance on the issue and say that it certainly isn’t a question of developers having not contacted their account managers or having dropped the ball. We were told no.

We will be releasing it [Wargroove] on PlayStation 4, we have finite resources and prioritized platforms that could cross-play as it was important to us to get the online nice and healthy rather than divide the player base. Work is going into the PS4 version now, it won’t have PS4 to PC cross-play as that would have forced us to attempt some sort of inelegant system to try and ensure Xbox/Switch players wouldn’t see each other despite both being able to play with PC players. PC lobbies becoming unavailable to Xbox / Switch players if a PS4 player joins maybe? There are no nice solutions.

As far as just flicking a switch goes, just to clarify, this is entirely from a technical perspective. I’m sure that if cross-play opens up it will come with lots of policies to adhere to (and these are a good thing) that could require work on our part. Aside from policy, there are no security or technical concerns I’m aware of hindering us. Because Wargroove runs on our own servers, any security needs to be in place regardless. It’s actually more work for us to restrict cross-play, to isolate platforms, than to just let it function,” Brice said on ResetEra.

There may be nothing more than a misunderstanding between the two parties. Maybe there’s something more behind the scenes.

Source: Gematsu