I'm curious if greed really is the contributing factor to this, like you said. In my mind I'm trying to pinpoint why Sony is so adamantly against this. Would playing a game that is cross platform ultimately hurt or help sales in the long run? That's the question I have.
It removes the reason of "My friends own this console so I have to buy it to play with them" from the purchasing decision. Therefore people who would've gone with Sony for that reason are now no longer a guaranteed buy.
How much that would hurt them, idk. But I'm sure they'd notice at least... Any lost sale is a loss that could've been avoided.
So I'd like to talk about this by first bringing up another industry in order to try to illustrate my point.
So, in the music industry, for a long time there was this idea that allowing streaming services (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) to have licensing for all of a label's popular acts would dramatically reduce revenue for that label. Streams have a very low per-play pay rate, magnitudes lower than a single song (typically $1.29) or an album (typically $9.99 or more). They were concerned with money - not with their fans and consumers, but with the idea that changing technology and social conventions could signal massive reductions in their bottom line unless they resisted. So, for years, they resisted. As things would have it, however, it turns out that people liked these streaming services, so much so that the industry eventually had to adapt. So what happened to revenue? Well, it's up 17% year-to-date, and that's just 2017.
So when we shift back to video games, and start talking about this as a problem of change, I think that what happened with music teaches a pretty valuable lesson. Obviously it's not a direct parallel - changing the consumption model entirely isn't the same as allowing crossplay by any means, and music never had a situation where labels didn't allow playing music on competing labels' devices. However, it still fits perfectly within the narrative of companies opposing their own consumers and resisting change. It seems like there's significant demand for crossplay. Sure, the proportion of XB1, Switch, PS4, and PC gamers that want this capability isn't 100%, and sure, the proportion of gamers who even play online at all isn't 100% either - but there's still a significant demand.
Let's look at this from Sony's perspective. If we enable crossplay across all our games that could support it, which is probably the vast majority despite what we've said, then there's a chance that a number of consumers could decide not to buy a PS4, of any model. They no longer have to do that in order to play cross-platform titles with their friends who have the same title. That's a $250-$400 purchase they're not going to make anymore - and that's before the actual games!
But let's look at this from an outside perspective once again. How many people actually buy a system specifically because they want to play with real-life friends who have that system? Conventional wisdom would suggest that this number is rather low - and
actual surveys indicate that just over half of dedicated gamers play with friends at all. Even ignoring that, though, how many games does the average console owner purchase? Well,
in 2013, that number was 18 overall games on two consoles - so about 9 per console. That's about $540 assuming a price of $60 for the typical big release. That's up to $300 more than you're going to spend on an actual console.
What if we look at this from a gamer's perspective? Let's say all your friends have a PS4, and they all play one of your favorite games on that system. But let's also say you have an XB1 - maybe you don't feel like purchasing that game because you only want to play it online with friends, but don't want to spend $250+ on a brand new console and $60 on the game just for that reason. If they had industry-wide crossplay, you could just get the $60 game and get going. But you don't, so that's $60 in revenue lost for the industry as a whole. If that happens just about 5 times, that's more revenue lost than the industry would lose as a whole on someone not buying a console - and I'm willing to bet that the number of times this situation happens is significantly more than the number of times someone buys a console just for one game to play with preexisting friends. For the people who make these games, then, it's clear that crossplay would likely result in less loss of revenue - more money! After all, it seems to be pretty common that when you make a platform more open and inviting to each consumer, it earns more money as a whole.
So why is Sony doing this? Basically, it comes down to the fact that Sony takes a much higher percentage of the revenue from a console than they do from many of the games on their consoles. Third party entities and contracted developer teams that make these games don't make money off a console sale, but they do take a statistically significant portion of the proceeds from a game they work on. That means less money for Sony. Take the following assumption to be true: the amount of revenue generated in console sales by keeping crossplay disabled is somewhat close to - or exceeds - the amount of revenue that would be generated in new game sales by enabling crossplay. If that is true, then Sony is making much more money now than they would with crossplay enabled. The other people involved are probably making a lot less, because they don't make anything on consoles.
It all comes down to greed - there's a strong chance that Sony is doing this because, while crossplay might be good for the industry as a whole, keeping these barriers up is good for exactly one entity: Sony. Consumers respond positively to open platforms; when sales of games go up because of this openness, the people who make video games make more money and can in turn produce better content next time around. The industry as a whole, as a system, tends toward decentralization - more to publishers and content creators, less to the console companies. That's just the nature of many creative spaces, and it's exactly why streaming services came to power in music and television; people like to support and be connected to the other people who make the things they like. Sony, however, makes more money in a closed, restrictive ecosystem - they would be better off keeping things centralized, keeping people in their network only. Using their technical powers to restrict crossplay is a decision squarely aimed at padding their revenues and profits at the expense of the industry as a whole.
That's just my two - or maybe twenty - cents, probably full of rambling.
I also want to make it clear that while I have a general distaste for the way things work right now, I don't play online anyway and don't own a PS4 or an XB1 currently, and I've owned both in the past. I don't hate Sony, I just think they don't have the best interests of content creators and consumers in mind.
![[PokeCommunity.com] The thread about Crossplay](https://i.imgur.com/4hyYOkp.jpg "[PokeCommunity.com] The thread about Crossplay")
