PlayStation: Sony demands money for every cross-play game, very strict conditions revealed

For a very long time, Sony closed its doors to cross-play with an almost discouraging firmness. It wasn’t until 2019 that the firm has finally opened up to this feature with a rather popular first game, a certain Fortnite, as a test. Epic Games, which develops and publishes the famous battle royale, is currently on trial against Apple and several emails were then made public as part of this legal battle. Among others, certain exchanges between the American company and Sony were then disclosed, revealing the very strict conditions of the Japanese giant concerning cross-play.

First, we learn that Epic Games had to go out of their way to convince Sony to open its borders: the company of Tim Sweeney has notably proposed to pass PlayStation “for heroes”, to include exclusive characters for subscribers to PS Plus or outright to release a game dedicated to PlayStation VR 2.

An email from Epic Games to Sony to convince them to open up to cross-play

We do not really know what was concluded but, above all, the Japanese manufacturer finally imposed … financial compensation, for all future games using cross-play. More precisely, we are talking about cross-progression, allowing players to recover their accounts and their purchases on any platform: precisely, If DLC has been purchased other than on PS4 / PS5 and a player wants to collect them from PlayStation via cross-progression, then Sony taxes the developer / publisher of the game to collect a certain amount. The goal is obviously to rebalance the balance, the company losing money on cross-play.

The famous boss of Epic Games specifies in passing that Sony is the only one to claim this compensation. Truth be told, PlayStation’s policy has always been to prioritize its content for its own media, although this tends to change slowly. PS4 exclusives are indeed starting to land on PC and recently we got wind of the very serious plan to bring flagship franchises to mobile. From there to what Sony cancels to invoice the studios for the cross-play? Maybe not.

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