Xbox Boss Responds To Sony Blocking Fortnite Crossplay

Sony made a lot of headlines this week with its impressive and extensive showing of four PlayStation 4 exclusives coming in the near future. But it also made the headlines for some less than flattering reasons as well.

Just like last E3, the discussion of crossplay came up, and Sony's rigid stance on the matter juxtaposed to Microsoft and Nintendo's more open and consumer friendly stance became a hot topic.

The discussion re-emerged from the depths after the announcement of Fortnite -- the world's biggest game -- for the Nintendo Switch, which it has released for already.

At the time of the announcement, it was revealed the game would support crossplay with every platform, except PlayStation 4, who like it is with Microsoft, is unwilling to play crossplay with Nintendo.

A similar situation developed last year with Minecraft, which features crossplay across the board, except when dealing with the PlayStation 4 version of the game.

The Fortnite instance has since been heightened by the reveal that if you've played on the PlayStation 4, you can't use the same Epic Games account on the Nintendo Switch. Again, this is a problem exclusive to PS4, who is obviously very reluctant to allow crossplay with its console space competitors.

All of that said, speaking to Giant Bomb, Xbox boss Phil Spencer addressed the ongoing debacle, and seemingly confirms that a resolution to the issue has made little to no progress. He added:

"If you bought your son, your child, an Xbox, and I bought my child a PlayStation - and I'm just a parent, it's their birthday, whatever - and the kids want to go play Fortnite and they all of a sudden go home and can't play with each other that doesn't feel like it helps the consumers," said Spencer. "If it doesn't help the developers and it doesn't help the consumer, then it doesn't feel like it helps to grow gaming to me."

Spencer did acknowledge he gets the business side of things, which is likely fueling Sony's decision much more than anything else, however, it's not an approach he would adopt for Microsoft if the market situation was on the other foot.

"I get the business side of it, and I'm not going to judge anybody else making their decisions because they've got to run their business," said Spencer.

"Our goal is to be relevant and important to every gamer on the planet. If people want to go buy someone else's console and play games there, great, as long as we're all leaning in to how do we make this business for everybody as vibrant as possible."

Fortnite currently boasts over 127 million players. You would think Sony would at least bite the bullet in this case in order to not eat a ton of bad PR, but at the moment, that's exactly what it is feasting on.

You can read about both Sony's response and Nintendo's response to the situation here and here.