Why Is It So Difficult To Allow Cross-Platform Play?

cookiej writes "I just got the most recent version of the Madden franchise ('10) for the PS3. Can somebody explain to me why EA has separate networks for the different platforms, only allowing players to compete with people using the same console? Back in the day, there were large discrepancies between the consoles, but these days it seems like the Xbox and the PS3 are at least near the same level. After so many releases for this franchise, they've got to have a fairly standardized protocol for networking; it seems arbitrary not to let them compete. Or am I just missing something obvious? Is it just a matter of Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network not working together?"

Comments

Why would they...

[tacarat]

... sell you one copy of a game when they can potentially sell you two or three?

Re:Why would they...

[KDR_11k]

Sony and Nintendo don't seem to care much, you run the servers, you do the matchups (though a PS3/Wii crossplatform game would likely have major version differences that would prevent multiplayer anyway). AFAIK MS is the problem with their paid-for XBox Live service.

Re:Why would they...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else is annoying? People who abbreviate "very" with "v.".

I mean, come on! It is only a four letter word for fuck's sake!

vendor lock in

[spiffmastercow]

That was most likely the decision of MS and Sony respectively. EA is evil, but you can't blame them for everything!

Re:vendor lock in

[EdIII]

I don't think you can blame anybody. It does not make sense for those two networks to allow people to play with each other. If I was making a purchasing decision, and most of my friends were playing some game on XBL, I would be more inclined to purchase the XBOX360 to play with my friends on XBL. Now, if the the PSN and XBL were linked, I could buy the PS3 instead.

Same logic works the other way to Microsoft's advantage.

So why would either of those two companies want to make it easier to buy the competitor's product?

Re:vendor lock in

[anti-pop-frustration]

That's a bullshit excuse.
Street Fighter 4 has been released on both xbox 360 and PC. It's the same *exact* game. On PC, online play is enabled through "live - games for windows" (or whatever the hell it is called), bottom line: microsoft provides online gaming for both platforms.

Not only that, but they are explicitly trying to market their pc and xbox online services as a single, unified product... Yet, they still won't allow cross-platform play.

Re:vendor lock in

[Bert64]

Games should retain the ability to play independent of the manufacturer supplied networks...

You know, so people can run their own private servers, join third party servers and engage in lan play. I've noticed a lot of console games don't even allow lan play anymore, we used to get a large group of friends together to play network games years ago, but that's becoming difficult these days.

Console != PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you want to allow your competitor console to play with yours. If one claims their network is superior to the others, that's a selling point and by allowing the other consoles to connect makes your "superior" network play a moot point.

I'm thinking.,..

[Datamonstar]

No. They just want to make more money.

Re:I'm thinking.,..

[Toonol]

No. The different consoles have different requirements for online play, and they aren't necessarily compatible. XBox live requires play through MS's servers and a live account. Sony requires companies to host their own. Nintendo has friend code requirements. It's not nearly as simple as the summary makes out.

Re:I'm thinking.,..

[BigDXLT]

The point is, it should be simple, but it's been made difficult for asinine reasons.

same as the PC

[Ambiguous Coward]

For the same reason console players can't play against PC players.

If they allowed a direct comparison between different platforms, people would realize more rapidly which is better and which is worse.

I'd love to see a match of TF2 between a bunch of console players vs. PC players. It'd be such a joke. :)

Re:same as the PC

[Toonol]

I don't think that's true. One platform might be at an advantage over the other, but that is an entirely different matter than being better. For instance, it's quite obvious a mouse has a competitive advantage over a gamepad in a FPS... but that doesn't mean a mouse/keyboard is necessarily a better input device. A gamepad is more ergonomic and can be played more easily from the couch, for instance.

A FPS designed for a console is best played on a console. One designed for a pc is best played on a pc. One designed for BOTH is probably equally bad on either.

Re:same as the PC

[Phydeaux314]

Some interfaces are inherently better for some tasks than others. That's why we use different interface devices, instead of having one "standard" one that has been proven to be the best possible choice. If we're restricted with regards to our input device, as we are with consoles, we work very hard on the game to make the input work with it.

Mice are best for FPS games because they allow for a nearly direct mapping of mouse location to screen location. It's fast, accurate, and refining accuracy from a general location is easy. Joysticks are best for flight tasks, because it offers a default state - the deadzone neutral - that mice do not offer, and constant directional input. To use a car analogy, trying to play a true FPS game on a console is like rigging up a knob on your dash that controls the speed of a motor turning your wheel.

Thumbsticks on consoles are handy because they work passably for a great number of game types with some developer effort. Fighting games are excellent with thumbsticks, driving and RPG games work decently enough, and FPS games can be kludged in if people don't mind dumbing down gameplay.

Obvious

[marcansoft]

MS and Sony (and Nintendo) want you to use their respective online frameworks. They obviously aren't compatible or interoperable (different name/nick/whatever namespaces, different friends lists, different registration procedure, etc).

You can't have cross-platform online interoperation unless EA uses an entirely custom online framework that is identical among platforms. The console manufacturers wouldn't be too happy about that, and neither would gamers (who want to register once and maintain one friends list for all games, not once for each vendor or game).

The only sane solution would require heavy cooperation between all console vendors and standardizing quite a bit of the online experience, but that's never going to happen (at least not this generation).

Re:Obvious

[Laminan]

This reminds me of the classic prisoner's dilemna and nash equilibrium. Clearly if they all cooperate they could create a common platform that would allow people to use software across their hardware platforms. But those who do not participate and get exclusive titles, would then be at an advantage. People might buy their 'one extra' console just to get those exclusive titles. It is silly, but that is a peak in the mind of a video gamepublishing exec.

Re:Obvious

[Toonol]

I disagree. The question is why doesn't EA treat its software like any other game maker who puts out a PC title.

Because it's flatly not possible for EA to do that. The console manufactures have strict guidelines about online play, and without their authorization, a game doesn't get published. It's possible for Sony, MS, and Nintendo to allow it; but it would be an unlikely exception.

Re:Obvious

[non0score]

Unless a cross-platform game company is willing to release their figures, I can't really cite a source. Even then, they can only release their numbers for the GPU (for obvious reasons).

To put this into perspective, let's just consider writing a game on the PS3 using console methodology vs. PC methodology. To begin with, you gain >50% performance just switching from PS3's OpenGL implementation to libGCM (15fps to 25fps...sad, I know). Then you consider the fact that you can carefully maintain your buffer states, early Z, double Z, special caches, etc...which is about 5~15% performance PER item (in addition to the fact that you can reinstate the buffer states). Then you consider the fact that you don't need to flush the rendering pipeline (~0.Xms per full flush), custom MSAA resolves (saves passes), hidden functions not exposed on PC hardware, texture bandwidth vs. computing power trade-offs, less worry about batched draw calls, etc.... In the end, it adds up to >50% performance loss going from hardware-specific to hardware-agnostic with an abstraction layer (DirectX or OpenGL). Put it another way: PS3 can push out about a couple million polygons per frame with all sorts of effects and stuff. You'd be hard pressed to find a PC game with a cross-hardware engine pushing out the same render quality at half the framerate.

On the other hand, the Intel CPU is way powerful and there really isn't a way for me to compare that vs. the PPC derivatives on the consoles. But trust me when I say that I've seen 1000X speedup by going from excellent C code to highly optimized ASM, which you can only feasibly get by working on a fixed hardware. However, I'm going to stop giving more details as I don't want to break NDA (everything I've said can be found on the web at very legitimate sites). If you want to know about the inner workings of the GPU (and maybe the CPU), you can always check out blogs such as Wolfgang Engel's (and remember to read comments!) or other GDC/SIGGRAPH presentations.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Also posting anon, as I'm a current network programmer for a well-known studio working on the 360 and PS3.

The first paragraph is 100% correct, and the second is how it goes when things suck. Our last title shipped with an animation bug in multiplayer. It's not that we didn't find the bug, it's that every time we found and reported it to the animation programmer, he would say "It's only happening in MP, it must be a multiplayer problem." Well, that's great, but our *network programmers* are not animation programmers and don't know how to debug animation issues. In the end, we shipped with it.

That's not the rule at my company, though. The vast majority of the time when we discover a bug in multiplayer that's in some other system, that system's owner takes care of it.

Anonymous Coward.

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually read something about this the other day... Sony doesnt care about it. They are actually allowing cross platform with the upcoming FFXIV MMORPG on Windows/PS3. I can't say I agree or disagree with MS's reasoning, but it has to do with Quality Control on XBOX360. Back in the PS2 and XBOX days, all servers were managed by the developer. After a few years, servers shut down, and people still continue to buy the game only to find out that when they try to go online, it doesnt work anymore. Since XBL users pay 50 bucks per year, MS has to offer quality control that all online games will be able to be played online. Since with a PC and PS3 the network access is free, SONY doesnt owe anything to their users.

Merge Difficulties

[quanticle]

Even if Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo were to come to an agreement about common online elements tomorrow, it'd still be nontrivial to merge all the player data, handle duplicate usernames, handle comparisons of records between different platforms and the such. Even if we disregard the political aspects, the technical aspects are daunting, and likely to grow even more so as these services continue to grow independently of one another.

Re:FLOATING POINT IS NOT CROSS PLATFORM

[ShadowRangerRIT]

For the two systems mentioned (Xbox 360 and PS3), they're both using variants on the PowerPC architecture. While I can't be sure, I believe both chips use IEEE floating point numbers (outside of Crays, most chips nowadays at least have the option of using IEEE floating point), so the errors should be identical. I think the bigger problem is that the networking protocol for these games is usually licensed from the console maker, using the console maker's servers for matchmaking and the like, and it's considered to be less of a hassle to program against two different APIs than it is to write a single network protocol from scratch and maintain the servers required to support it.

Re:Pretty sure that is a Live issue

[RoadDoggFL]

I agree with this, but didn't notice until now that cross-platform gameplay (PC-to-console) has been done on the 360 with Live (Shadowrun, FFXI) but not with the PS3/PSN. Even the Dreamcast let console players play in games with/against PC players. Just find it odd. As for the initial question, MS has a lot more to lose by letting PS3 players play online with players on the 360. It'd hugely tarnish the perceived value of Live if every game you joined was already full of people playing online for free.

Re:its a really simple answer

[Nyall]

woosh went over your heads. A silly question got a glib answer.

Easy

[sleeponthemic]

because it costs money, money that doesn't translate into sales.

A lot like linux native support is perceived.

Re:OT: who to blame for economic woes (vendor lock

[mrsteele]

Seriously? Fucking insightful? I hate seeing this same meme bandied about.

There were multiple actions by the government that worked together with a firm belief that housing prices would continue to rise to cause this situation. Deregulation by one party. Broadening lending standards by another. Bankers who found ways to make money that while not illegal, required a firm willful ignorance of potential future calamity.

No one group is responsible for this, and to try and claim otherwise shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation.

Re:OT: who to blame for economic woes (vendor lock

[BlueStrat]

Seriously? Fucking insightful? I hate seeing this same meme bandied about.

There were multiple actions by the government that worked together with a firm belief that housing prices would continue to rise to cause this situation. Deregulation by one party. Broadening lending standards by another. Bankers who found ways to make money that while not illegal, required a firm willful ignorance of potential future calamity.

No one group is responsible for this, and to try and claim otherwise shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation.

You are correct that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are solely responsible, and nowhere did I claim or imply that. Both parties are at fault. The fault is with corrupt politicians seeking to increase their own wealth & power, and attempting to use the public's money to buy votes. I believe there are also other forces at work using these failings of both sides to advance their own agenda to "fundamentally change America", to quote Obama.

I'm very scared of precisely *what* that "change" that these forces seek will mean to our Republic and our Freedom.

Strat