As you might heard, some rather big news came out of E3 in the form of Minecraft where Microsoft announced that they would be making the game cross-platform compatible. This means that gamers across multiple platforms would be able to play the game together, whether they be on mobile, the Nintendo Switch, or the Xbox One.Missing from that list was Sony who had apparently refused to support the feature, a decision that we’re sure many are wondering about. For those who are curious, Sony has since offered up an explanation in an interview with Eurogamer. According to Sony’s PlayStation global sales and marketing head Jim Ryan, it seems that this boils down to “responsibility”.
Ryan was quoted as saying, “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.”
When it was pointed out that even Nintendo had allowed for this, why shouldn’t Sony, Ryan replied with, “Yeah, that’s true. Everybody has to take their own decisions. We’ll do that. Like I say, we have no philosophical stance against cross-play at all.” Either way it seems that Sony’s decision is pretty firm at the moment, so we guess PS4 gamers don’t really have a choice but to be left out for now.
Filed in . Read more about E3, E3 2017, Minecraft, PS4 and Sony.