The Cold War of gaming may finally be over – in a development that seems hard to believe for many console owners, ID@Xbox Director Chris Charla has announced that cross-network play will finally be available on Xbox One. While officially, this is meant to allow Xbox One and PC players to play together, it also brings the possibility that Xbox One players will be able to play games against PS4 owners.
“In addition to natively supporting cross-platform play between Xbox One and Windows 10 games that use Xbox Live, we’re enabling developers to support cross-network play as well.” said Charla in an announcement. “This means players on Xbox One and Windows 10 using Xbox Live will be able to play with players on different online multiplayer networks – including other console and PC networks.”
And, as part of that announcement, Charla also said that Psyonix’s car-soccer megahit Rocket League would be the first title to have cross-network play between Xbox One and PC – “with an open invitation for other networks to participate as well.” That means we might soon see PS4 players competing against Xbox One players on the Rocket League … pitch? It brings a whole new meaning to the term “console wars.”
It is important to keep in mind that this only means that Microsoft has extended the ability to do this to developers – it is up to those developers to now implement the feature into future games. We’ll see how long it takes to truly see universal cross-platform play.