There’s an evergreen request from people who play Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) that Zenimax Online Services (ZOS) add crossplay to the game. ESO came out 11 years ago. I wasn’t there for it. While the combat system was designed for console controller limitations, it launched on PC first. When the console ports became available, ZOS offered a one-time migration of PC accounts to a console account.
Ever since, people have been asking for crossplay. It comes up month after month, year after year on the forums. Currently, people on the console EU “megaservers” are particularly animated about it, because the current, quite-miserable state of PVP mechanics, combined with widespread performance problems, is leading their instances of Cyrodill and Imperial City to be desolate of players. They want crossplay at least between Xbox and Playstation just to have enough people to make it worth the effort.
Every couple of years, some muckety-muck at ZOS will say, yes, we understand people want it, but, no, we’re not working on it. They try to blunt people’s fervor over it, but never quite shut the door on implementing it, and wind up contributing to this never-ending communal belly-ache as much as anyone else.
As someone who has been doing full-stack development for 30 years, it seems to me that it would be an absolute nightmare to go back into an 11-year-old code base and add something as architecturally fundamental as crossplay. I would imagine that literally everything would be impacted. Every database call would have to be re-thought in the light of merging all the databases together. The structure of the databases themselves might have to change. And they can’t just lump it ALL together. They still have to have US and EU “megaservers” because of connection latency. (But maybe combining PC, PS, and Xbox servers per region would enable them to finally make one in the PAC, which people have also been requesting for years.)
When I wade into these arguments on the forums, I always ask if anyone thinks ZOS could justify the investment in time and equipment to implement crossplay, in terms of addition revenue over time for the company. I remind people that it has to not just make more money that it would cost, but it also has to make them more money than other things they could be doing. I’ve asked what percentage of the current player base would be added by doing it: 100%? 50%? 25%? 10%? No one has been willing to state that they think it would be significant.
The last time I was banging around in one of these threads, someone said that many games have implemented crossplay after launch, and that it had been very successful for them. I was incredulous, so off to ChatGPT I went. Imagine my surprise when I discovered he was right! Several notable games have, in fact, done this, and it seems to have been quite successful: Destiny 2, Apex Legends, Overwatch, Borderlands 3, Dead by Daylight, No Man’s Sky, Minecraft, and Halo. And it wasn’t like these were all using Unreal Engine, which added the capability for “free” with some big release. Most of these games use custom engines, and still managed to pull it off. Further, I asked ChatGPT to summarize the effects in a graph.
As you can see from the (somewhat poorly rendered) graph, player engagement jumped after implementing crossplay in all of these games. Not only that, but bump has been sustained. So it would seem that this is, in fact, a pretty solid idea, even from a business point of view. At this point, I can see a scenario where ZOS’s hedging about implementing it is less about playing a PR game has been not telling hard core fans, “NO!”, but rather more about internally waffling while trying to figure out how to pull it off, given the demands of the constant monetization game that is the core of ESO as a business. But just like that, as I was writing this up, it’s become official! Just today, Matt Firor just said that they’re working on (the architectural elements needed to support) crossplay.
This same request keeps coming up in ZOS’s sister company Bethesda’s game Fallout 76. Just sayin’…