Cross-platform play for Rocket League delayed to 2019

After promising to bring cross-platform play to Rocket League in 2018, developer Psyonix has now delayed the feature until early 2019. The feature has been requested for a long time from fans, and is particularly important now that Sony have opened PlayStation consoles up to it too.

Currently Psyonix is working on implementing cross-platform gaming in Rocket League, also known as RocketID internally, for all platforms. As long as the developer has been given permission to open cross-platform gaming by a platform holder then they will be working on implementing it.

Some believe that the reason behind the delay could be Sony and the PlayStation 4. Sony only recently stated that they would be looking into opening up the platform for cross-play with select third party content, which would be well into the development cycle for RocketID at Psyonix. It’s possible that Psyonix want to launch RocketID for every platform at once, avoiding any issues caused by the later inclusion of others.

After much campaigning from gamers and a marketing effort that focused on the cross-platform feature in Fortnite between Microsoft and Nintendo, Sony finally assessed their stance on the situation. Fortnite is the current test for cross-platform gaming on PlayStation 4, and will be the benchmark against which all titles must be compared to when it comes to the level of quality expected in games with cross-play.

Psyonix is aware of how much gamers want this feature added to Rocket League, and the developer has promised it will be delivered as soon as possible. They want to ensure that RocketID is as intuitive, polished, and stable as possible before players get their hands on it.

For many the ability to play games with friends on other platforms is completely alien, but very welcome. Most games that release across multiple platforms have multiplayer features that would benefit from cross-platform gaming, while the platform exclusives tend to be single-player affairs with huge open worlds and deep stories to tell. Moving into 2019 cross-platform should become more common, but it remains to be seen just how open Sony will be with the PlayStation 4.