Wow! I am so confused by MS right now. Lol. One moment they appear to be building a walled garden the next they are building bridges to other communities.
They adapt. They tried with the "wall" philosphy, it failed and they blamed communication when players refuse it while it was just one of the dumbass move ever made by a big gaming company. Now, they're trying with the "bridge" philosophy and this is great : no need for marketing shit, just throw the good moves and profit from it.
More bridge, less walls is great for players.
Cool feature, but I think this only will benefit Xbox and PC initially. I can't seem many devs supporting cross-platform play between Xbox and PSN. Not worth the extra coding complexity & dev time.
I think it is worth it. We don't need "many devs" supporting it, we just the need the "big names" of online gaming supporting it. When you build a game like Final fantasy XIV or Call of Duty, you don't want the community to be divised between platforms, it's not natural at all and this is the worst situation for big games like this. The more players you have on the same server, the easier it is to find a match, a party, or another player to play with, even when the game did not sell well on one particular platform. This is huge.
Just think of the difference between SFIV and SFV. SFIV's community on pc wasn't really healthy, it was really hard to find a match. SFV community is healthier bu a large margin thank to cross platform even when the game sold way less than its predecessor.
Devs accepted it until now because there was no other choice for online gaming. Isn't the case anymore, and there is big potential here.
