Highlights
- Epic Games is expanding its crossplay tools to support major consoles, allowing developers to easily implement cross-platform play in their games.
- The tools aim to connect more players and integrate cross-platform features into games, simplifying the process of implementing crossplay multiplayer functions.
- The expansion of crossplay capability means that more players will be able to join multiplayer games with their friends regardless of platform, benefiting both the gaming community and Epic Games as a company.
Epic Games announced on Wednesday that it will be expanding its crossplay tools to support major consoles, allowing game developers to more easily implement cross-platform play into their games. The tools come as part of Epic Games' free software development kit, Epic Online Services.
Given the massive success of Fortnite, a cross-platform multiplayer game, it is no surprise that Epic Games has been an avid supporter of the idea of crossplay. Typically, developers need to port their games across different platforms and digital storefronts, and players with different platforms or who purchased the game from different PC stores cannot join games together. Epic's new tools seek to remedy this by allowing developers to seamlessly connect more players and integrate cross-platform features into their games. The company first announced its crossplay tools in 2022, and at that time, they were limited to PC and allowed players to connect across the Epic Games Store and Steam. The new features included an overlay that merged Steam and Epic Games Store friends into a single list and allowed game invites across the two PC stores.
Now, Epic Games has expanded these tools to include support for PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch, as it announced in a blog post on Wednesday. The Epic Online Services overlay will be consistent across PC and console platforms, allowing players to see all their friends in a unified place, quickly create a new Epic Games account linked to their native platform account, as well as send and receive game invites and play across platforms. The crossplay game services, like Epic Online Services' other toolkits, are designed to work with any game engine and any store or platform.
This overlay should greatly simplify the process of implementing crossplay multiplayer functions into games, allowing friends who own games on different consoles or from different PC stores to play together. With over 750 million Epic Games accounts currently and hundreds of games using Epic Online Services, this means that a massive number of players will soon have crossplay capability. Crossplay is just one of many tools offered by Epic Online Services, which can allow game developers to have a single back-end service provider and can greatly simplify the development process.
This is sure to be an exciting update; expanded crossplay means that more players will soon be able to join multiplayer games with their friends regardless of platform, allowing for more connectivity within the greater gaming community. Epic Games also stands to benefit, as the new tool is also likely to prompt game developers to use Epic's other services, such as its popular creation tool Unreal Engine 5, and gamers might be more likely to buy from its PC store using their existing Epic Games account.
Source: Epic Games