According to rumours, the much anticipated next generation first-person shooter game in the successful Battlefield series, Battlefield 2042, will enter its Beta stage of development soon. Starting October 8, fans of the series will get to experience the latest and greatest that video game publisher Electronic Arts, the second largest gaming company in America and Europe, has to offer. When a new, large video game in a well-known series gets announced the rumour mill amongst gamers starts to run in overdrive. Speculation about the theme, setting, playable characters, time period and locations of playable maps common amongst impatient gamers. Yet, as the gaming industry has evolved, a new item is added to the list of speculation topics; does it have crossplay?.
Crossplay, or cross-platform support, is the ability of players using different platforms (e.g., PlayStation, Xbox, PC) to play online with each other simultaneously. Crossplay is becoming more important in the gaming industry as successful multiplayer games like Call of Duty: Warzone, Fortnite and Minecraft have pushed crossplay into attention. A lot of these titles’ success even, can be attributed to the fact that they enable users of different platforms to play together. Before crossplay gained traction, gamers on different platforms that wanted to play together, were out of luck.
In addition to the benefits that gamers enjoy from crossplay becoming more of a standard in online play, another effect on the gaming industry is to be expected. Online play has always been about providing a platform to gamers and game studios to interact with each other. Before crossplay gained traction, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, as producers of the most popular gaming consoles, owned the only available gaming platforms. Within these platforms, separately, network externalities added value to the platforms. The companies connect video game producing companies (e.g., EA or Ubisoft) with end users; video gamers. More of each attracts more of the other. The more users a platform has, the more value it generates. Nobody wants to play on an unknown platform with only a handful of users. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo own the choke points through which value is created in online gaming.
With crossplay, however, the choke point through which value is created is starting to shift from the consoles to the video game producers. Video game studios are now creating their own platform centered around their online game, where all users can join, regardless of the hardware they own. The more popular a game gets, the more power the company behind the game starts to enjoy. This results in a shifting of balance in the gaming industry. Where at first, a video game producer might have had to pay a significant fee to have its game released on Microsoft’s Xbox, this could work the other way around in the future.
Sources used:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/all-cross-platform-games/
https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/battlefield-2042-beta-release/
