This week, Sony rolled out Discord voice chat support for PlayStation 5 consoles, marking the first time that OS-wide third-party voice calling was available on Sony consoles.
Previously, PlayStation 5 users could display on their Discord profiles what game they were currently playing, but they could not communicate with other players without using their phones, tablets, or computers.
With support for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, Discord has the potential to be the voice-over-IP service for cross-platform multiplayer gaming, which has begun to move towards mainstream adoption for the first time in the last couple of years.
Of course, this is great for Discord as a platform and company – and it would be great to see competing services follow suit so that Discord doesn’t have a monopoly on this kind of functionality.
However, even having just one service achieve this is a big boon for cross-play advocates and a sign that the multiplayer gaming landscape is very different from previous generation consoles.
Dream of cross play
Online gamers have been asking for the opportunity to play with their friends on different platforms for at least two decades, but it has been a long and bumpy journey to get closer to making the dream any closer to reality.
There were, of course, some outliers over the years. The Sega Dreamcast, released back in 1998, has made several attempts at cross-platform play: game developers have worked with Microsoft to connect Dreamcast and Windows PC players in games like Quake 3 Arena and Phantasy Star Online.
Shortly thereafter, Final Fantasy XI made headlines in 2002 by offering cross-platform play between PlayStation 2 and PC players.
And Microsoft has spent many years gradually expanding cross-play between Xbox consoles and Windows PCs in games like Minecraft or the Forza franchise.
But until recently, cross-play between console platforms was virtually non-existent. Whichever console platform was the top seller of a given generation didn’t have a strong incentive to support it. If Sony allowed PlayStation 4 players to play with their friends on Xbox One, the snowball effect of the console’s market dominance would be somewhat lessened as there was less social incentive to buy a PS4 instead of an Xbox One. The same thing happened with the dominant (at least initially) Microsoft Xbox 360 and the less powerful PS3.
However, to be clear, not everything was decided for developers and players at that point; It was later revealed that Epic had to pay Sony to offer Fortnite crossplay to offset Sony’s related losses.
Fortnite wasn’t the first and only cross-platform game, but it opened the floodgates like never before. While Sony didn’t provide all developers with easy-to-use tools and APIs to facilitate cross-play, it began to play well with the growing roster of developers who had the right to push, notably including Activision with Call of Duty.
Now, more games than ever – big and small – enable crossplay, even between PlayStation and Xbox. It’s not the most new games yet, but the trend is moving in that direction.