The PlayStation is Not Getting Crossplay for Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3 is getting crossplay.

Now, that’s not normally something I would take the time to report on, since it’s been a promised feature for a while now and it’s not really that impressive, but there’s one interesting caveat to this story that makes it worth notice: the PlayStation will not be getting crossplay.
 

Good news or bad news first? Good News: An update for Borderlands 3 has been prepared for release that includes full crossplay support across all platforms. Bad News: For certification, we have been required by the publisher to remove crossplay support for PlayStation consoles.

Now, we’ve known for ages now that Sony doesn’t really play ball when it comes to crossplay, which is strange, since generally speaking that’s the kind of attitude we’d expect from Nintendo. Yet, through the years, Sony has been the sticking point in this particular issue, and it’s only been in recent years that they’ve slowly loosened up their stance on it. But as the tweet above mentions, it’s actually the publishers, not Sony itself, that’s causing the PlayStation players to stay in their forced little bubble.

As for why the publishers — that would be 2K — don’t want to support Sony crossplay? It might have something to do with the fact that the only reason Sony relented on crossplay was when they decided they could take a portion of the sales of any successful games that use it. And since 2K definitely doesn’t want to split their Borderlands 3 fortunes any more than they already have to, they’ve decided to just leave Sony out.

It’s doubtful that either Sony or 2K are going to change their stance on this issue, but it is interesting to see how these almost backdoor business deals can impact who we get to play with.