Randy Pitchford Says PlayStation Blocked Borderlands 3 Crossplay
Borderlands 3 will not receive crossplay on PlayStation later this year, according to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford.
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Gearbox promised that Borderlands 3 would eventually have crossplay, just not when it launched back in 2019. Then a year after release, Gearbox arrived at PAX Online to announce Borderlands 3 crossplay coming in 2021.
Now it’s 2021 and we’re finally getting good news on crossplay. But not if you’re a Vault Hunter currently playing on either of Sony’s consoles.
“Good News: An update for Borderlands 3 has been prepared for release that includes full crossplay support across all platforms,” announced Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford in a tweet earlier today. “Bad News: For certification, we have been required by the publisher to remove crossplay support for PlayStation consoles.”
Pitchford didn’t elaborate on why the publisher required crossplay to be removed for PlayStation specifically, but we have some ideas.
It’s possible that 2K asked for Gearbox to remove PlayStation crossplay, but they don’t really have a reason to do so. Everyone loves crossplay–except for Sony. Sony has long been the holdout for crossplay amongst the big three console makers, and we recently found out why.
Documents from the Epic versus Apple court case revealed that Sony couldn’t justify to themselves why crossplay was a good business idea. They already had the majority share of console players, so crossplay only seemed to provide incentive for their customers to buy a rival console.
But in 2019, the company finally came up with a scheme that brought them to the crossplay table. It was essentially a revenue-sharing model that gave Sony a split of all sales for a crossplay-compatible game. Neither Xbox nor Nintendo requires revenue sharing for crossplay, so this essentially means–at least for some titles–that Sony would take a small cut off of every non-PlayStation game sold with crossplay.
We’re speculating here, but it’s certainly possible that 2K balked at giving up a share of its other console sales just to include PlayStation in Borderlands 3 crossplay, so they likely just said “screw it” and told Gearbox to remove PlayStation from the upcoming crossplay patch.
Either way, expect to hear some official statements from Gearbox and 2K in the coming days about Borderlands 3 crossplay and how Sony is the odd one out.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/randy-pitchford-sony-playstation-crossplay-blocked/