Sony takes a commission from publishers for crossplay on PlayStation

Sony for a long time did not want to support the crossplay function on PlayStation consoles, refusing to share its audience with competitors. In 2019, she changed her mind, but set a condition — game publishers will have to pay a commission.

This became known from internal documents that surfaced during the trial of Epic Games and Apple.

In 2018, Epic Games asked Sony to add a crossplay feature to Fortnite. For this, the company promised an exclusive for PS VR 2, a unique character for PS Plus subscribers, PlayStation-style branding of Epic Games at E3 and concessions in the license for the Unreal Engine 4 engine.

Sony disagreed.

No later than August 2019 (there is no explanation in the documents about earlier dates) Sony began to conclude similar deals, but with one nuance — a commission is charged for crossplay. However, not all publishers should pay a commission, but only those who have a PSN game revenue in relation to the share of gameplay on PlayStation consoles less than 0.85. According to Sony, only in this case it can compensate for losses from crossplay.

It should be noted that Sony later demanded that the court hide the documents posted online with this information.