Xbox and Switch are becoming online buddies, where is Sony?

Nintendo has announced that Rocket League is coming to the Switch, and the game will support cross-platform play with the Xbox One and PC. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to play with those on the PlayStation 4 platform.

Microsoft featured many Minecraft announcements at its own press conference, including the fact that the Xbox One version of the game will feature cross-platform play with other platforms ... excluding the PlayStation 4 family of consoles.

“The original Java PC version and all other isolated versions will have ‘Edition’ names, like Minecraft: Wii U Edition and Minecraft: Java Edition,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Polygon. “Further, we are still in discussions with Sony about PlayStation and have nothing to confirm at this point. We would love to work with Sony to bring players on PlayStation 4 into our united ecosystem as well.”

That sentiment was mirrored online by other people on the Minecraft team.

Rocket League developer Psyonix told Polygon that the work is done. All they need is Sony to say yes.

“It’s literally something we could do with a push of a button, metaphorically,” Psyonix’s Jeremy Dunham told Polygon. “In reality it’s a web page with a checkbox on it. All we have to do is check that box and it would be up and running in less than an hour all over the world. That’s all we need to do.”

It doesn’t seem like Sony is going to say yes anytime soon.

“It's certainly not a profound philosophical stance we have against this,” PlayStation global sales and marketing head Jim Ryan told Eurogamer. “We've done it in the past. We're always open to conversations with any developer or publisher who wants to talk about it. Unfortunately it's a commercial discussion between ourselves and other stakeholders, and I'm not going to get into the detail of that on this particular instance. And I can see your eyes rolling.”

Your eyes will roll even more when you see Ryan’s follow-up answer about Minecraft players being young and Sony not being able to keep them safe if they allow cross-platform play.

“We have a contract with the people who go online with us, that we look after them and they are within the PlayStation curated universe,” Ryan said. “Exposing what in many cases are children to external influences we have no ability to manage or look after, it's something we have to think about very carefully.”

Oh.

It sure seems like Nintendo and Microsoft are comfortable playing nice with each other with these announcements, and it would be a great thing for players if Sony joined in.