Sony’s Cross-Platform Lockout in Fortnite is Bad for Everybody
Fortnite players on PS4 are seeing pettiness brought to a whole new (and legally dubious) low
Earlier this week, Nintendo announced the release of Epic Games’ hugely popular Fortnite for the Switch. Fans were very excited about the prospects of dying embarrassingly fast on the go without getting to blame it on touch controls, with Nintendo reporting it had already been downloaded more than two million times in its first 24 hours. But that excitement was quickly met with confusion and anger as many players realized their accounts wouldn’t be accepted on Nintendo’s platform. It turns out, if you’ve played Fortnite on the Playstation 4, you’re locked out on Switch — permanently.
Anybody familiar with the soap opera drama of the games industry should not be surprised that Fortnite’s Switch players and PS4 players can’t play together. Sony has long been an opponent of cross-platform play, notably with games like Rocket League and Fortnite, which enjoy full cross-platform play everywhere but Sony’s consoles. It’s not hard to understand why they want it that way, either — Playstation 4 is the sitting champion of the console market, and enabling cross-platform play would only serve their competitors and undermine their own market dominance. Of course cross-platform play is good for consumers, but business decisions rarely account for what they want anyway.
But this is different. Because, unlike games such as Rocket League or Minecraft, where Xbox or Nintendo players are simply prevented from playing alongside PS4 players and vice-versa, Fortnite blocks your Epic account from running on those platforms. If your Epic ID has been used on a PS4, it’s permanently associated with the platform, and is no longer a valid account on its competitors’ consoles. This goes both ways, meaning if you associate your Epic ID to a Nintendo Switch and then try to play on your PS4 you are denied as well. This doesn’t occur between Xbox and Nintendo, meaning Sony is the only platform playing these lock-down shenanigans.
This is also how the most effective cults work, but that’s neither here nor there.
Interestingly, this doesn’t stop or start with Fortnite. If you made the mistake of participating in Epic’s ill-fated Paragon beta on PS4 in 2016, your account is affected too. Never mind the fact that that game no longer exists, or that the Switch was still a rumor at that point. You don’t have to have ever played Fortnite on your PS4 for your Epic ID to be branded and claimed by Sony in perpetuity. The only way you can play on Switch or Xbox One is if you create a whole new Epic account, which will not only lose you access to your progress and unlocked content, but also in-game purchases. Sony’s war on cross-platform play isn’t new, but this ridiculous approach to cross-platform progress is, and it’s gross.
Players are understandably very upset about this. PS4 and Switch share a massive overlap in their user-base, with NPD Analyst Mat Piscatella stating that 40% of Switch owners also owned a PS4, a number which will only grow with time. For many, the Switch and the PS4 are not competitors, and it doesn’t jive with them to see them treated as such. Even long-time self-proclaimed Sony fanboys like Greg Miller are voicing their utter displeasure in Sony’s kibosh on cross-progression:
While it’s clearly Sony pulling the strings to make this anti-consumer practice a reality, Epic hasn’t done much to tug back. This isn’t an issue shared with other games that use universal accounts, like Blizzard’s Battletags, or Ubisoft’s uPlay IDs. While progress and microtransactions for some of either of those companies’ games are tied to the original platform, none of them outright block access to the account because of where it’s been before. Epic hasn’t clearly communicated to players that they should expect this to happen, nor have they given them the opportunity to reverse it. They’ve yet to comment on the controversy, but their silence is deafening for a lot of fans, who are already questioning the legal implications of letting a third party hijack and control access to their accounts. As it stands, Epic’s players are unwittingly forfeiting access to content they worked hard for and, more importantly, paid for.
Fortnite is a game that seems eager to be in it for the long haul. Earlier this year, they dedicated $100 million in prize money for their 2018–2019 competitive season, and they just announced the Fortnite World Cup, which will be holding open qualifiers to anybody around the world before the main event next fall. Players are being encouraged and incentivized to squad up, scrim, and compete at a competitive level, and they hope to stoke the fires for a serious esports presence for years to come. That goal is being undermined by their kowtowing to Sony’s shortsighted, petty console war. If Epic plays their hand right, Fortnite will outlive the PS4 and continue on the next generation for years to come. But allowing Sony to dictate the future of those players’ accounts devalues them, and burns through goodwill in the process.
Epic laid out a very strong, promising roadmap for the future of Fortnite, but that news has been lost in the sea of negative press thanks to Sony’s practices. And while Sony will likely never budge, it’s Fortnite and its PS4 players that suffer. I’m confident Epic will do the right thing and offer a better solution for players looking to take their progress to another platform, even if cross-play never becomes a reality. Because, frankly, they might have to.
This article was written by Super Jump contributor, Jared Johnson. Please check out his work and follow him on Medium.
