Sony commits to PlayStation 5 cross-play despite a shaky past

By Eric Abent/June 21, 2021 4:14 pm EST

About midway through the previous generation, we saw console manufacturers begin to open up their platforms to cross-platform play. While there was some resistance from Sony, the company wound up allowing cross-play on PlayStation 4 because of Fortnite. Recent news may have suggested that Sony is still resistant to cross-play to some degree, but the company has now committed to offering it in multiplatform games in the future.

In a recent interview with Axios, Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan stated plainly that Sony will continue to allow cross-play in PlayStation games. "We support and encourage cross-play," Ryan said in the brief interview, naming several big-name titles that already support cross-play like Rocket League, Fortnite, and Minecraft. "That number will continue to grow," Ryan added.

That's certainly good news for those with a PlayStation 5 who have friends on other platforms because it wasn't very long ago that we heard about cross-play issues with PlayStation consoles. Back in May, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford announced that while cross-play would be coming to most versions of Borderlands 3, the studio had been "required by the publisher" to remove such support for PlayStation consoles.

We're still unsure if Sony or 2K Games (the publisher of Borderlands 3) is responsible for that. In his interview with Axios, Ryan didn't clarify the matter, saying only that he wouldn't talk about a "live business issue with a long-standing partner." He did say that Sony's "policies are consistent across all of the publishers," but sadly, that doesn't tell us why there isn't cross-play in the PlayStation versions of Borderlands 3.

The matter of cross-play in Borderlands 3 may be worked out in the future, and if Sony is committed to cross-play on PlayStation consoles, we obviously hope that it will be. We'll let you know if anything changes on that front, but for now, it seems we've got Sony's word that cross-play will continue to be supported on PlayStation 5.