"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 pressed for clarification since Nintendo, a company famously protective of their young audience, is willing to cooperate, Ryan offered, “Everybody has to take their own decisions.”
I can sort of imagine this making sense though. Like, I don’t know how this is going to work, but will there be any kind of communication between platforms when you’re playing Minecraft or Rocket League? Text chat? Voice chat? Obviously Minecraft has its own category of problems since so much is user created too.
I don’t know if any of those details have been explained between Xbox/PC/Nintendo, but it’s sort of new territory. If it was just Xbox/PC, that’s all in a sort of unified ecosystem on some level with Live/MS accounts, but now that Nintendo’s in the mix, there’s going to need to be a lot of careful cross-company communications about how to handle it when that pervy Nintendo creep builds a penis house and I’m scarred by it on my Xbox. Reporting users and administering bans/warnings/suspensions is suddenly a lot more complicated.
It’s easy enough to imagine Sony (or really any of these companies) looking at cross-company moderation and saying “Nah, no one wants that headache”, and then being caught by surprise when learning that in fact, the other companies are willing to work through that.
So anyway, until we know some real details about the nuts and bolts of how your kids are playing Nintendo Minecraft with some kids playing Xbox Minecraft, it’s probably too soon to pass too harsh a judgement on Sony for sitting this out so far. And even if it quickly seems obvious that Sony made a mistake by not getting in on this, it’s a mistake that—in the absence of further information otherwise—I can pretty easily understand as an honest one, not necessarily driven by arrogance or anything.
The best part was when Jim Ryan acknowledged Wesley Yin-Poole’s eye-rolling.
[quote]
It’s certainly not a profound philosophical stance we have against this. We’ve done it in the past. We’re always open to conversations with any developer or publisher who wants to talk about it. Unfortunately it’s a commercial discussion between ourselves and other stakeholders, and I’m not going to get into the detail of that on this particular instance. And I can see your eyes rolling.[/quote]
Eh, it’s just a question of which company it is to lead the market. If you have the biggest online platform, you don’t want others to tap into your pool an benefit from the bigger community. It’s your leverage to get even more people to buy your system. In the previous generation the Xbox 360 was significantly ahead of the PS3 in the NA market and also had the more established online platform. Unsurprisingly enough, Sony was a lot more open to console cross-platform gaming then, and it was Microsoft that had no interest in doing that.
Yeah, except that I’m sure Rocket League had cross play between PC and PS4 when it launched. Wasn’t a problem then. But introduce other consoles into the mix, and suddenly Sony can’t handle it?
No, it really is just Sony thinking that they’re winning, and trying to make life harder for other consoles at the expense of their own customers. It’s funny how Sony and MS keep alternating with these boneheaded moves. At some point you’d think they’d learn that treating the gamers well rather than as corporate property seems to correlate with success…
Cross-platform play is downright antithetical to the console business model. What’s the best reason to buy a PS4? Your friends have them.
Why are Microsoft and Nintendo embracing it today? Have they suddenly decided that consumers come first, and their mission is to provide us the best experience possible? Is Sony simply more evil than its competitors? Puhh-leeze. It’s because they’re a distant #2 and a barely-even-worth-counting #3.
The thing is though, PSN’s ability to block or report users is essentially non-existent compared to XBL. You can’t avoid players or anything. You can block direct communications from them, and report them through a cumbersome process which largely does nothing.
So the idea that Sony is afraid of other networks users is kind of bull.
On the other hand, their network being terrible in general and having some dumb networking issue that makes this not work properly is the best theory I’ve seen that isn’t the obvious (and likely correct) “They’re in the lead and doing the same thing last gen’s leader did in the same position”.
