Just in time to start a new fanboy war on Twitter, confidential emails between the two companies have revealed that Sony wouldn’t enable cross-play without “compensation”. Dial your Drama-O-Meters to max.
Sony’s reluctance to join the cross-play cuddle party isn’t exactly a secret. Subsequent to a Fortnite “configuration issue” that temporarily enabled cross-play between PS4 and Xbox One consoles back in 2017, however, and the company realising, perhaps, that disingenuous excuses about kids’ safety on the intertubes weren’t gonna work this time, cross-play has been available with a limited selection of games. Fortnite is one of them.
But according to evidence and testimony presented to the court at the Epic Games v. Apple case this week, this convenience for the players (lol) comes at a cost to the studio (not so lol). Published by The Verge, a 2018 email from Epic Games business development manager Joe Kreiner to Sony’s director of developer relations Gio Corsi proposed a deal that included an Unreal Engine licence extension, exclusive Fortnite content for PlayStation users, and even a big-budget E3 marketing campaign.
We announce crossplay in conjunction with Sony. Epic goes out of its way to make Sony look like heroes.
But a copy of the reply, published on Eurogamer, shows that the deal was a bust. This deal, anyway. A new deal was made, and with it, a 2019 document stipulating a royalty fee to “offset the reduction in revenue” for relevant cross-play games. Fortnite is one of those too.
“In certain circumstances Epic will have to pay additional revenue to Sony,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told the court. “If somebody were primarily playing on PlayStation, but paying on iPhone then this might trigger compensation.”
Sweeney also confirmed that Sony is the only platform holder with this policy. Awkward. For Sony, I mean, but Microsoft too – because you know those guys are thinking “shit, we could’ve been making bank on this stupid game, omg”.