Videogame accidentally enables Xbox One and PS4 cross-play, Microsoft boss responds


History was created by Epic Games last night. The developer accidentally enabled PS4 and Xbox One cross-play for its popular title Fortnite.

The developer quickly disabled the feature after realizing their mistake and termed it as being a bug, which it is referring as being a ‘configuration issue’.  For a few hours though, PS4 and Xbox One users were able to compete against each other playing on their respective consoles.

Although Microsoft has been very open about cross-play and many games such as Rocket League provides the feature between PC, Switch and Xbox One for games like Rocket League and Minecraft, Sony has so far stayed away from enabling it.

There’s a good reason for it too, with Sony being the market leader for home consoles, it doesn’t want to make the market open by enabling such a feature which might severely affect sales.

Although Fortnite does allow cross-play between the PS4 and PC, it was a huge shock when some redditors discovered that they can now play with Xbox One users as well.

One redditor named Pre-CISION was among the first to discover that Xbox One players were on matches being played by PS4 users:

I noticed the gamer tag of this dude had a space in it, which was bizarre. I figured it was just the game glitching out so I searched for his tag with an underscore on Playstation Network without any luck.

Feeling suspicious, he booted up his Xbox One and searched for this dude’s gamertag (who had just recently killed him in a deathmatch on Fortnite). Surprisingly, he found the player and also seeing his achievement, it was clear that he owned Fortnite.

Another image posted on reddit showed a father-son duo playing Fortnite. The only anomaly was the fact that while the father was playing on a PS4, his son was playing against him using an Xbox One. All hell broke loose for a few hours until Epic Games quickly confirmed this was indeed happening and assured fans it was ‘fixed.

We had a configuration issue and it has now been corrected.”

Pre-Cision, our dear redditor had this to say to Kotaku:

I’ve been keeping up on the news of crossplay and felt this was a game changer, the world could exist with both major console networks happily together,

But, the story didn’t end there, Xbox One boss Phil Spencer surprisingly responded when a fan bought this issue up to him:

Going by his comments, it’s clear Microsoft is keen to enable cross-play with PS4 users, the ball is totally in Sony’s court now and although it’s unlikely, there’s definitely some glimmer of hope going by how things are turning out to be.