Blizzard Wants Cross-Platform Support For Overwatch

Fortnite is inspiring a lot more developers to take a good, hard look at cross-platform support for their games. This time it's Overwatch, the popular hero shooter made by Blizzard Entertainment.

This past weekend at BlizzCon, Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan told Eurogamer that he's definitely interested in supporting cross-play.

"We're super excited about what's going on with cross-play in all sorts of games, from Rocket League to Fortnite," Kaplan said, "and we are constantly in discussions with the first-parties, Microsoft and Sony, to see where they're at and gauge where their temperature is at."

Unfortunately, wanting to do something and actually doing it are two different things. And at the moment, it doesn't appear that Blizzard is actually taking the steps to make cross-platform support happen. According to Kaplan, there are a lot of roadblocks.

"It's very complicated — from a technology standpoint, a game design standpoint, and from a business relationship standpoint," he said. "But we would be excited to tackle all of those challenges. We would love to try."

It's tough to argue against the many benefits cross-platform support could provide. In Fortnite's case, that game is on just about every platform under the sun, which means players are within an arm's reach of playing just about anywhere. And the player pools for games can grow significantly larger when the entire base is unified across platforms.

Sony recently relented on its policy of a gated community, allowing Fortnite to take the initial cross-platform leap on its platform. Fortnite players can now play with other players no matter what they game on, whether it's PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, or mobile. And other games, like Psyonix's Rocket League, are looking to follow in Fortnite's footsteps by enabling cross-platform play on PlayStation, giving those players an opportunity to join up with those on other systems and devices.

Another Blizzard title, Diablo 3, has plans for cross-platform support in the future.