Building bridges

Age of the Geek: Where does a 600 pound gorilla sit?
Wherever the two ton elephant tells him to.
Thus is the story of Sony and Epic Games as the latter flipped the script and ultimately forced the former to bend to their will.
Traditionally, video game developers are beholden to the whims of the consoles they want to put their games on. If you want your game on Sony's PlayStation console, you need to play by their rules. For the most part this has been true even for the highest profile developers in the industry.
Which only goes to show how big Epic Games' "Fortnite: Battle Royale" has become.
"Fortnite: Battle Royale" hit the scene just over a year ago, taking the world by ever-enclosing storm. Since this it's become hard to get away from. Not only can you play it on your PC and home console, but you can also even get it on your phone, allowing you to work on your kill/death ratio no matter where you go.
With one exception.
If you are a console gamer, your Fortnite account could only be linked to either an Xbox One or a PlayStation 4. Players on either console can be matched up against PC players or very brave mobile players, but they cannot interact with each other.
Or, more accurately, they can, but Sony doesn't allow it.
The spark for the gaming community to focus on cross-play began last year when Epic Games accidentally activated the option on "Fortnite: Battle Royale," allowing players on the Xbox One and PS4 to enter the same battlegrounds. The accident only lasted for a couple hours, but it was enough to make the community take notice and definitively prove that there were no technical limitations preventing cross-platform play.
As "Fortnite: Battle Royale" continued to grow in popularity, the accident (if you believe it to really be an accident) happened again in January, once again reminding players that there is a whole world of players out there playing the same game, just not with each other.
While Microsoft made it known they were perfectly willing to facilitate cross-play on their side of things, Sony maintained a hardline stance against it.
To be fair to Sony, disallowing cross-play makes sense for them from a ruthless business standpoint. In this generation of video game consoles, they hold the majority share of the market. This market muscle allows them to give potential customers an ultimatum. Either play "Fortnite: Battle Royale" on a PlayStation 4 (where they can get a cut of that sweet microtransaction money) or play on the Xbox One with a much smaller playerbase.
In a game like "Fortnite: Battle Royale," where matches consist of 100 players at a time, the size of the active playerbase is vital to keep wait times down. By disallowing cross-play, Sony not only protects their profitability, they also hobble their direct competitor.
But then Nintendo came along and helped turn Sony's hardline stance against them. The first volley came when Nintendo, on the forefront of online gaming for once, partnered with Microsoft for a joint marketing campaign to promote the release of "Minecraft" on the Nintendo Switch. The "Better Together" update made a big deal about the various versions of Minecraft becoming compatible across all platforms, letting players build and play together regardless if they were on a Switch, an Xbox, PC, or mobile device.
But not if you were on a PlayStation.
The omission of the PlayStation from the shared "Minecraft" environment made Sony's walled garden look more like a lonely island. Sony might have a larger market share than any one console maker, but they aren't larger than all of them together. Particularly with the Switch projected to outpace sales of the PS4 this year.
Even "Minecraft" a gaming juggernaut of its own, wasn't enough to get Sony to budge. It was only after "Fortnite: Battle Royale" made its way to the Switch that momentum finally started to change.
Unlike the Xbox One, the Nintendo Switch isn't really a direct competitor to the PlayStation 4. It's more of a secondary system, making it more likely to be owned by PlayStation 4 owners. So when "Fortnight: Battle Royale" finally made its way to the Switch, those PS4 owners were not happy to discover that their accounts couldn't be linked to the new platform.
Sony held firm for a while but finally, after a year of building pressure, they have caved. Last week Sony launched a cross-play beta, finally taking down one of the walls in their garden.
This is big news not just for "Fortnite: Battle Royale," but for gaming in general. Now that the walls are starting to come down, players of multiplatform games like "Rocket League" and "Overwatch" are eagerly anticipating their seat on the cross-play train.
With the last holdout gone, it looks like cross-play will soon be the new industry standard rather than the exception, which may ruffle the accountants a bit, but it's great for consumers.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and wishes Epic Games would direct some of that battle royale attention back to the tower defense half of the game.