Rocket League was recently announced to be coming to the Switch at Nintendo’s E3 and developer Psyonix have confirmed in an interview with Polygon to focus on a stable 60 FPS performance at 720p (both docked and undocked), stating that performance matters more than visual fidelity.
The dev also says that Switch, XB1 and PC owners will be able to play together due to cross-play but not PS4. Jeremy Dunham, VP of publishing at Psyonix said that Sony has not yet granted them permission to allow cross-play, the reason for which he claims to not know. He also says that it’s purely a communicational roadblock, rather than technical as implementing PS4 cross-play is just “a web page with a checkbox” away.
When PlayStation’s global sales and marketing head was approached with this same issue (but regarding Minecraft, this time) by Eurogamer he said:
“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.”
After being prodded further he added: “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.”
Yeah something definitely doesn’t seem right. Caring more about stakeholders’ opinions than the gamers’? Plus, this is nothing that should negatively affect their console sales in any way. So what is your opinion on the Switch version of Rocket League? And is the Sony exec’s statement justified in refusing cross-play for both Minecraft and Rocket League? Let us know your thoughts.