Why no Xbox?

[Kosmos992k]

What would they as devs and others devs gain from lying? You do know that they can be sued for it? I believe neither Sony or Microsoft see computer as their competitors and have no problem making this cross play. But we are talking about cross play between consoles here, which is a totally different matter, because they are huge rivals and sony as the leader sales wise gets much more money, if they don't allow xbox players to play with ps4 players, because many consoles are sold on the argument "hey my friend has THIS console, so i need to buy it in order to play with them". This means the person has to buy the console, the game and the ps+/gold sub, which is huge for the companys. Now FF14 is an different matters and i do believe this is on microsoft, cause they don't want to bend their others rules for MMO imo. But in general, microsoft is more open to cross play between consoles then sony it seems. independend devs have no reason to lie here. Also the whole "past" - argument is a bit difficult to use here, cause things can change as we've seen time and time ago. As an example even Microsoft allowed cross play before their huge rule change. One of the examples was FF11, in which Xbox 360 and PS2 players could play together.

OK, look I know you want to play white knight for Microsoft and Xbox, it's quite clear. But, there is no reason why PSN and XBL have to open up to each other to have Xbox and PlayStation players together in a game. I didn't say the developer was lying, I said they were using 'marketing speak'.

For any game that uses 3rd party servers such as FFXIV for example, there is absolutely zero requirement for any integration of XBL and PSN. None. Nada, nil, zero, naught. Get the picture? You're posting in this topic and pushing a fluff piece about MS champion of cross platform play when MS has been actively engaged in curtailing cross platform play for years. Not only that, you're the one suggesting that the console maker who has shown them self more open to cross platform play than any other - Sony - is the obstacle. That's simply nonsense.

Microsoft wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have the ability to control their customers through XBL, but they also want cross platform play. To do that requires Sony to open PSN to XBL and in turn to anything connected to XBL. Sony on the other hand has good reason to keep PSN locked as tightly as they can, and there is no real need for that kind of integration since game developers are *free* to implement cross platform multiplayer if they wish, as long as it doesn't rely on Sony servers.

By forcing their own customers to work within XBL for cross platform play, MS continues to be able to require XBL Gold membership for online play, and is able to control what their players can and cannot see/do. Basically MS has a walled garden called Xbox Live and they won't allow their Xbox people out of the garden. PSN is a walled garden of it's own, but instead of the PlayStation being locked within the walled garden, Playstation people can decide for themselves whether they want to enter the garden or not, and they can leave whenever they want. Playing FFXIV is completely outside the walled garden of PSN, Sony doesn't do anything to prevent me or the millions of other PS4 owners from playing on game servers beyond their control.

When Microsoft announced their conversion to being open to multiplayer, so many media outlets took it at face value and started publishing pieces asking why Sony hasn't responded, and wondering whether they will or not. That would be a false narrative because PlayStation was/is already open to cross platform multi-player. The trouble is that the media outlets did not look deeply enough to realize a) cross Platform multiplayer is already available to PlayStation, b) the only reason Xbox players are unable to do it is Microsoft's own policies and restrictions, c) nothing about what Microsoft proposes actually removes the basic limitations and restrictions placed on Xbox users already and d) that Microsoft's scheme continues to lock their Xbox users inside XBL forcing Sony (and others) to open their networks to XBL in order to allow Xbox players to see anything beyond Xbox Live. As I have already said, Sony has no reason or interest in opening PSN to any potential hacks, and opening to XBL creates a nice big hole for hackers to exploit.

I'm sorry, but in no way do I see Microsoft being the good buy here. Besides that, nothing about the MS announcement of new openness actually addresses the problems with letting Xbox players into FFXIV. The reason for that is that to do so, MS would have to allow Xbox players to play multi-player outside XBL for free. If MS did that on one game, they'd have to do it for all games, and they'd lose sole control over multi-player for Xbox - and be unable to mandate XBL Gold membership for the privilege. That's why they won't, that's why Xbox isn't in FFXIV, and that has everything to do with Microsoft and their policies and *nothing* to do with Sony.

There is also zero mention of the actual agreement which is required between MS & Sony for cross-platform and we likely won't hear of its details publicly.

So it isn't as simple as "Sony just has to turn it on". Sony & MS both have to come to an agreement to enable it.

Indeed, but even with an agreement it's still not that simple. Not only would there need to be contract terms agreed, but there would also need to be two way indemnity clauses in the event that one network was successfully hacked or disrupted via the other. Additionally, any agreement would require Sony to implement some level of integration of PSN to XBL. That would take fairly substantial changes to their client and server side code for PSN to enable this - not to mention on going security and testing challenges.

Sony really have very little to gain from this, and quite a lot to lose if something goes wrong with it.