Microsoft's Open Invitation To Valve, Nintendo and Others To Join Xbox One and PC Crossplay (vg247.com)

Microsoft has said it's ready to have a "conversation" with any development team that wants to feature crossplay support on consoles and PC. From a report: Mike Ybarra, vice president of Xbox, told VG247 that it's happy to talk to the likes of Valve and Nintendo when it comes to getting multiplayer games working across multiple platforms, not just between Xbox One and Windows. "It's more about gamer choice, more about making an IP on our platform last longer. I don't care about where they play, I just want people to have fun playing games because that's just better for the industry," said Ybarra. "The demands of consumers and developers have changed," he continued. "People are like, 'we want all of our gamers in one multiplayer pool together, playing.' "We totally agree with that. If any developer wants to have that conversation... Valve is right down the street from us, Nintendo is too -- they're like a block from us. We're having these discussions as developers come up, and we're completely open to that."

Comments

Whoa .. that's weird

[OzPeter]

I read that as

Microsoft's Open Invitation To Valve, Nintendo and Others To Join Xbox One and PC Cosplay

And wondered what the hell sorts of things are going on in MS these days.

Crosspwn

[sinij]

At least in case of Valve/PC, any crossplay will quickly turn into massacre. For example, in FPS keyboard and mouse players of moderate skill would dominate competition-level console players. The same would hold in RTS or any other game where skill element revolves around player control.

Re:Crosspwn

[andreas.hummelbrunne]

In this day and age, you can connect a mouse and keyboard to your console.

Re:Crosspwn

[magusxxx]

Yes, but the console players can't set up macros. Which is a huge advantage to PC players especially during PvP matches. Hit one key = Perform several moves before the console player hits their second button.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...

[Lothsahn]

This would be the embrace phase...

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/...

You know once they're at 75%+ marketshare, they'll change their tune...

Re:Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...

[Lothsahn]

That's the problem with building a bad reputation. It takes a long time to fix.

I'm not anti-MS, per se. I use MS Windows every day and it works well. I like SQL Server. Skype is great. Outlook is buggy, Office 365 is awful, and Skype for business is terrible (but getting better). MS, like any large company, has good and bad products.

Give me a few examples where MS has super majority marketshare and is taking action to embrace the community, and I'll reconsider my opinion.

Re:Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...

[denis-The-menace]

It's what makes MS...MS.

Until you see it often enough AS IT HAPPENS, you don't see a pattern.

Won't work

[Ty]

This won't work for many of the most popular types of games, including FPS. WASD + mouse input will always outperform dual joysticks.

Also, I'll be damned, as a PC player, that I want to hear chatter from 12 year old kids rattling on about my mother's vagina. Because of the price point of PC systems, there seems to just be far fewer twits like that.

It's the same old Microsoft

[tietokone-olmi]

Inviting everyone to come join them in a walled garden Microsoft itself controls. It's not like their online service wasn't available to paid subscribers only, the low-level protocols undocumented and proprietary.

Let me get this right

[OneHundredAndTen]

MS is inviting all these people to do MS's work for free, and for MS's benefit. What an honor.

Re:Let me get this right

[PingSpike]

"Microsoft invites competitors in positions of strength to cut their own throats."

I waiting for the cheerleaders...

[MrKaos]

cartwheeling in from stage left and stage right, big smiles and pom poms, kicking their legs out like dancers, shaking their stuff screaming EMBRACE, EXTEND, EXTINGUISH!

Awww, being last always helps

[Imazalil]

While I agree with MS that full cross-platform play should be a thing, lets be clear about MS's intentions. They're loosing badly to Sony on console sales, and well, Windows Store is a tiny spec compared to Steam. They weren't making any noise about this last generation when they were much closer (maybe even leading, I haven't kept up with the numbers) in market share.

Kinda like Internet Explorer was just fine as was when it had the market share, but once it started getting dumped by people MS realized that maybe web standards/interoperability were a "thing they should do".

They also know full well that this would be much harder for Sony to pull off than it is for them as Xbox & Win10 share quite a bit. Maybe Valve can ask MS to provide support for all this (and Direct X 12) for older version of Windows before they come on-board.

lol, very opportunistic of them to ask now

[HalAtWork]

MS was asked many times to do cross platform networking, FFXI (MS refused, Sony did it square skipped MS with FFXIV), Borderlands 2, Steam w/Portal 2 on 360 (MS refused, Sony did it on PS3)

MS gave this reasoning via Kotaku: "Here's a Microsoft spokesperson saying "no," while promoting how awesome the Xbox 360's online service is: "Xbox Live delivers the best entertainment experience unmatched by anyone else, with 35 million actively engaged members. We have a high level of expectation for our game developers to ensure that all Live experiences remain top notch. Because we can't guarantee this level of quality, or control the player experience on other consoles or gaming networks, we currently do not open our network to games that allow this cross-over capability.""

Now that they need players on Xbox Live and Windows Store and are having trouble making inroads in those areas, they're panhandling.

Re:lol, very opportunistic of them to ask now

[Kjella]

Pretty much par for the course, it's always the underdog(s) asking for compatibility, interoperability and so on to break into the market. The top dog is giving it lip service or coming up with excuses with how it hampers innovation and creates a poor customer experience. Occasionally during the toppling an actual industry standard appears more or less by accident, unless it's just an oligarchy designing it like DVDs but pretty much all business alliances are temporary. Which means that yesterday's friend is now your enemy or vice versa. Or even your frenemy.

First IBM was the enemy and Microsoft the hero. Then Microsoft the enemy and Apple(?) the hero. Then Apple the enemy and Google the hero. Then Google the enemy and so on, round and round it goes. If Microsoft wants to open source ASP.NET Core and Apple wants to open source Swift they're a friend today, tomorrow they're back to spyware and walled gardens. Or even doing both at the same time in different markets because they're top dog in one and the underdog in the other. It's basically "king of the hill" for adults, if one big kid tries to hold it many small kids will knock him down.

Could someone translate for me?

[roystgnr]

"I don't care about where they play, I just want people to have fun playing games because that's just better for the industry,"

sounds like it ought to mean

"We'll still support future Minecraft releases on Mac, Linux, and older Windows versions after all; sorry about the confusion at E3!"

but I'm guessing it actually means

"I'm lying. I'm lying right now. Isn't it fun that I can lie to your face, and you can't even call me on it or I'll just give someone else the "story"? Now type my lies for me, stenographer. Maybe tell your kids to take a few classes in economics rather than journalism, huh?"

lol, very opportunistic of them to ask now

[HalAtWork]

They refused with FFXI, FFXIV, Borderlands 2, Steam when Valve were trying to get Portal 2 cross platform multiplayer/voice etc. Sony accepted by the way.

Of course now lagging behind online with Xbox and Windows Store they are shamelessly doing a reversal...

Here's a classic quote from back in the day, the same kind of thing they're chiding others for saying currently, via Kotaku:

"Here's a Microsoft spokesperson saying "no," while promoting how awesome the Xbox 360's online service is: "Xbox Live delivers the best entertainment experience unmatched by anyone else, with 35 million actively engaged members. We have a high level of expectation for our game developers to ensure that all Live experiences remain top notch. Because we can't guarantee this level of quality, or control the player experience on other consoles or gaming networks, we currently do not open our network to games that allow this cross-over capability.""