Cross-Platform Gaming: Coming Soon to a Console Near You

Posted by Brian Johnson on
Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 8:56 pm

If there is one thing that’s been part of video game culture since the beginning, it’s the debate among gamers over which platform is superior. Slinging insults at each other’s machines was easy with such a large arsenal of differences – graphical performance, exclusive titles and modding ability, to name a few. If you were a fourth grader at Pacific Drive Elementary in Fullerton, Calif., in 1993, you no doubt faced my position that the Sega Genesis was clearly the better platform because of how “cool” it was that you could turn blood on and off with the secret ABACABB code in “Mortal Kombat.” As fun as those debates were, I think the days of arguing about which platform is better will soon be over, as cross-platform gaming makes platforms less important.

The most common form of cross-platform gaming today is the ability to play a game across a platform family. Nintendo first started experimenting with this concept back in 1999 with the Transfer Pak, a device that lets players move data between the N64 and the mobile Game Boy. By 2002, players could use the Game Boy to get special items and information while playing “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker,” on the GameCube. These days, the insanely popular handheld DS can be connected wirelessly to the insanely popular Wii, allowing the DS to be used as a controller on some games.

Sony enabled cross-platform gaming in 2006 by allowing a wireless connection between the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Portable. It’s rumored that in Sony’s upcoming racing juggernaut, “Gran Turismo 5,” players will be able to use the PSP as a rearview mirror while driving. In the 2007 game “Shadowrun,” Microsoft first allowed PC players to game with Xbox players. If it’s taken this long to create links between related platforms, are we going to see true cross-platform gaming in the near future? You can bet your directional pad we will.

For a long time, one of the biggest hurdles to true cross-platform gaming was the ability to network gaming platforms. But with the release of the PS3 and the Wii in November 2006, all three of the current-generation home consoles have built-in network connections.

Perhaps an even bigger obstacle to cross-platform gaming has been software. Platforms have long been defined by their exclusive game titles. And nobody knows exclusive titles better than Nintendo, which has the most recognizable intellectual property in the industry. The only way to play Mario or Zelda games is on Nintendo hardware. Although exclusive titles drive hardware sales, the cost to secure the contracts with third-party software developers is big.

I believe we will see a push from third-party developers away from exclusive titles and toward cross-platform gaming. Third-party developers want as many people as possible playing their games. Having a multi-platform game – and allowing play across platforms – would prolong the life of the game and create a larger ecosystem around it. The “Metal Gear” series has long been a Sony exclusive, but a “Metal Gear” game has been announced for the Xbox 360. The successful game “Bioshock” started on the PC and Xbox 360 in 2007 and came to the PS3 in 2008 with “Bioshock 2” scheduled for release in November 2010 on all three platforms.

When you combine the ability to network game platforms and a trend toward fewer exclusive titles, the environment is right for true cross-platform gaming. Consoles are no longer vastly different from one another or from PCs in their graphical performance. The processing power of mobile gaming devices is also increasing. The platform playing field is becoming more level, making it feasible to play the same game on a variety of devices.

And, in the not-so-distant future, PCs will start to use server-side gaming, meaning the game will not be run locally, but streamed over the Internet. Consoles will eventually follow this model. Once we get to this kind of off-site rendering, all platforms will essentially be equal.

For the platform manufacturers, it may make sense to suppress cross-platform gaming and continue to use exclusive games to drive hardware sales. But for game developers and especially gamers, cross-platform gaming can only be a good thing. The next time an Xbox gamer challenges his PC friend, that friend might not be able to hide behind the incompatibility of his machine.

Brian Johnson is a student in the MCDM program who is pursuing a career in the video game industry. He has had a lifelong involvement with video games starting with educational PC games in the 1980s. His favorite video game is “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.”