It's not really a question of allow. The issue is that it takes more development time and resources. "Should" is a poor term. It would probably be in their best interest to put in that extra time, but you have to understand that game development is already last minute and fraught with issues.
Then there are issues where things like cross platform play and cross platform saving/loading are much easier to implement if the game is designed that way from the ground up. If it isn't, such as games with timed exclusives or where multiple platforms are not originally planned, then it becomes more difficult.
Game dev here: The issue with integrated cross-platform progression, beside taking dev time, there's also the issue of the platform companies' TOS. You can't just enable cross-play or cross-progression, you have to convince Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo (Apple and Google too if you want to go mobile too) to allow you to do so.
Once you've done this, you also have to develop a separate backend to store progression, because you can't use the native storage of the consoles you're working on. This doubles or more the dev time of any affected features (saves, multiplayer, matchmaking, in game store, customization, chat, friends, guilds, etc..).
While doing that, you also need to make sure that your new systems also respect TOS for stuff like profanity filters, disconnection behaviour, error handling, etc...
It really doesn't make sense for ALL games. But yeah it's worth it for "online-only" games, like Destiny 2, where the market strategy is to have a huge amount of players playing at the same time.
firebeard_81 on November 23rd, 2020 at 07:12 UTC »
It's not really a question of allow. The issue is that it takes more development time and resources. "Should" is a poor term. It would probably be in their best interest to put in that extra time, but you have to understand that game development is already last minute and fraught with issues.
Then there are issues where things like cross platform play and cross platform saving/loading are much easier to implement if the game is designed that way from the ground up. If it isn't, such as games with timed exclusives or where multiple platforms are not originally planned, then it becomes more difficult.
mistakenlymade on November 23rd, 2020 at 07:13 UTC »
I really wish some of the saves I've had on the Xbox or Nintendo can easily be transferred over to the Playstation or vice versa.
Edit: I'm sorry for the miss spelling
Drackhyo on November 23rd, 2020 at 12:22 UTC »
Game dev here: The issue with integrated cross-platform progression, beside taking dev time, there's also the issue of the platform companies' TOS. You can't just enable cross-play or cross-progression, you have to convince Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo (Apple and Google too if you want to go mobile too) to allow you to do so.
Once you've done this, you also have to develop a separate backend to store progression, because you can't use the native storage of the consoles you're working on. This doubles or more the dev time of any affected features (saves, multiplayer, matchmaking, in game store, customization, chat, friends, guilds, etc..).
While doing that, you also need to make sure that your new systems also respect TOS for stuff like profanity filters, disconnection behaviour, error handling, etc...
It really doesn't make sense for ALL games. But yeah it's worth it for "online-only" games, like Destiny 2, where the market strategy is to have a huge amount of players playing at the same time.