Most of us still remember the days when games were only available for handheld devices and consoles. It was a time when 8-bit games were hitting the market with tens of millions of copies sold. A couple of years later, game systems shifted to bigger games incorporating 3D graphics, but it was next to impossible to play with your friends online. All game consoles and PCs were unable to connect players, and team play was only a dream in the beginning. But this has changed after high-speed and low-latency internet connections became widely available to the general audience in many countries.
Since that point, this became a strategic move for game development studios to design a game that supports online tournaments and activities. But after that potential was achieved and mobile gaming became a thing and not just a way to kill some time on your way back home, game developers started thinking of how to connect different worlds together. Although there were just a handful of approaches to connect mobile games with consoles or PCs (challenging because of dramatic differences in gameplay and UI), developers managed to enable crossplay for console and PC gamers. Now you can play a couple of shooters and strategies from both your PC and Xbox or PlayStation, especially when you have subscriptions to PlayStation Network or Xbox Live.
Big game studios like Ubisoft and brands like 777bet invested significant budgets into allowing people to play their games from any PC or Android device, but iOS devices tend to have fewer releases due to the platform not being fully open and flexible for developers to implement technologies like Ray Tracing.
Is Cross-Play a Thing or Just a Hype?
Crossplay is definitely a trend for major game studios, and they invest so much effort in building a healthy community that can play their games no matter which device they own. Cross-progress is another important thing to mention when we talk about cross-play, as it allows you to hot swap devices while still having the same progress. Cross-play is a missing brick that connects people from different worlds: PC gamers and console enthusiasts who will never leave their favorite platform but want to play together.
Cross-play is important for business because it means a larger and healthier player base that will stay inside the game longer because of the faster matchmaking and ability to play with friends. You can combine audiences from various platforms and keep them together in the same gaming environment to improve matchmaking, especially off-peak hours when the number of players tends to go down. Better competition and skill matching is important for both newbies and vetted players because in most cases these two groups are not interested in competing with each other.
Another thing that made cross-play so addictive is the ability to play with your friends, as social bonds increase the return rate, making players stick to the same games for years. And the more time people spend in the game, the more profit this game generates in the long run. Sometimes people even build new social bonds within games when in-game mates become their real-life friends.
To sum things up, we can definitely say that cross-play is here to stay, and this trend is going to be implemented in more and more titles in the coming years.
Challenges Cross-Play Brings to The Scene
Although cross-play is fun when you are a gamer, it can be a great mess when you are a developer. Networking and latency, input and control differences, different UX, and differences in platform policies, as well as security and cheating prevention, are what make life harder for game development companies that want to implement a cross-play feature into their games.
Think of it like when you need to optimize the game for a completely different architecture and hardware, and make the process seamless so console users won’t have a worse experience compared to PC gamers. That is way harder to achieve than to state, especially when PC users have endless possibilities for using 3rd party software that gives them an unprecedented advantage in aiming and speed of reaction. Control difference is another big issue because a controller can barely compete with a mouse and keyboard in speed and precision. And don’t forget about different policies that work on different platforms, and if you want cross-play to be a reality, you should go through a compliance hell over and over.
Aside from tech and compliance issues, there are security and cheating questions that drive gamers mad. PC users have way more ways to cheat, not only because they can alter game files but also buy special devices and software that make cheating easier and hardly detectable. And if that happens, it can devastate the entire gaming experience for other platforms that, in turn, will push people to stop playing and stop paying. On the other side of the question are anti-cheat systems that can solve one question, but provoke the other when false positives lead to bans and game freezes that hard the overall experience.
And don’t forget about testing issues. When you introduce a cross-play feature, you will have to double, if not triple, your budget for testing because now you need to ensure your game works smoothly on two or three different platforms simultaneously. It’s hard, pricey, and not all game development studios do it right. Poor testing leads to poor performance and tons of bugs and glitches on various platforms, pushing developers to release zero-day patches and updates, but that’s definitely not what most of the players want to experience when they pay the full price and even buy collectors’ editions.
What About The Cloud?
Cloud gaming was one of the steps the industry took to bring cross-play to a brand new level. Cloud infrastructure promised a seamless gameplay from any deceive that supports playing video streams. Cloud instances were to remove the hardware differences and fix the issue with cheating. However, after years of cloud gaming being introduced by Google and other players, we can state that the concept is dead and almost nobody wants to play (pay for?) games in the cloud.