Cross-save and cross-play features are currently a misleading mess.

The gaming industry is in an incredibly strange place right now, stuck between an outdated system of selling hardware by pushing exclusions, and players expecting their entertainment from the new reality to travel with them across various platforms.

Today, the walls between PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo and PC gaming ecosystems have never been thin, but this has caused some unexpected problems. Much more tension is evident in the game than the issue of cross-play and cross-save support.

This is an increasingly frustrating problem

Cross-play occurs when you are playing a game on one console or PC, and you can play against people on another platform. Cross-save is when your in-game progress and gear can be accessed on more than one platform. So if you get level five in a game on your phone, and you start playing that game on your switch, cross-save support means that you will also be level five. If you can invite someone playing on Xbox to join you, it means that the game has cross-play. Makes sense?

The problem is that the implementation of these ideas is almost always more complex than expected.

to take Destiny 2, A free-to-play game. Cross-play is coming later this year, and currently, you can link accounts to enable cross-save. This way you can play on PC and then pick up where you left PlayStation 5, but when you’re on PlayStation 5, you can’t play against anyone on PC – at least, not yet . And if you own an extension on one platform, but you want to move to another platform? Hard luck, because the search content in each extension can only be played on the platform where you paid for it, even if your season pass can be used anywhere. This is confusing as hell!

Image: Bungy / Hyperactivity

Then you have People outside, Which offers cross-play (although it was buggy at launch), allowing you to play with your friends on various consoles. The game is also free via Pass, although not on PC if you have Game Pass Ultimate. There is also cross-save support between console generations, so players starting on PlayStation 4 can move their character to the final PlayStation 5, and Xbox One players can do the same when they get Xbox Series X, but currently There is no way to take progress from one stage to another.

Incoming Diablo 2: Revived Will also offer cross-save, so you can play at home on your PC and then take the game on the road when Nintendo switches. Although, cross-play is not supported, you will not be able to play with friends on other consoles.

Both cross-play and cross-save are becoming more popular, but it is not always clear how each game uses these terms and what will allow or not. When Fortnite Launched on the Nintendo Switch, no one realized that the accounts they had on PlayStation 4 could not be used on the Switch, and if you had already used that account on your Switch, you would You can exclude yourself from playing on PlayStation 4. . In that case, players found out that they had been ruled out of playing on at least one system based on a rule they were never told until it was too late.

Then there is Warframe, Which lets you bring your PC account to your switch, but you can only do it once, and it basically splits your account into two. Once you jump, the progress you make on the switch will not go back to the PC, or vice versa.

When you find a game in which both cross-play and cross-save actually work, what allows you to bring the characters from stage to stage and play against someone else on other consoles? It is absolute bliss, even in games that are not setting the world on fire.

Is it ever going to be better?

Yes. With cross-play and cross-save the situation has already improved substantially since the early days of gaming, when each console was a fully walled garden, and there was no overlap between players or progress between them.

Those walls are uprooted, and they are uprooted. Being able to play Warzone Against my friends on PC when I’m on my Xbox Series X and my progress is being saved to account and the console is not something that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

Other forms of entertainment are not distributed in the walls in the same way. If you switch from iOS to Android then imagine your Netflix subscription working on just a few TVs, or your Kindle app doesn’t keep your bookmarks. You can think about services like Netflix or Disney Plus on your own console, but the price of admission is a subscription fee, not hundreds of dollars for a box that sits near your TV.

Video games as a business depended on specialized hardware that was never profitable on its own; Sales of games and digital content are cooked into the business strategy. This presents a problem if each game becomes playable on any platform, and progress and purchases are locked into a player’s account, not the platform. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are not selling you hardware, they are selling you a store, and there is a very good reason that Walmart will not exchange you something you bought on Amazon.

That’s why Microsoft is trying to get ahead of the pack by focusing on services rather than hardware, and unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s Game Pass is already the service most like Netflix. If Sony doesn’t feel pressured to match Microsoft’s features on the game pass with its own PlayStation Now offering, it will be soon.

Whoever figures out the best way to get players wants a major advantage for everyone, though, by definition, every major company needs to cross-play and cross-if to some extent working together. Savings have become standard.

As those companies try to figure out, however, confusion is expected to continue, and be sure to do a lot of homework before making an assumption about what these words mean. It is a time of transition for the industry, and things are moving in the right direction, but for now, this temporary mess is still a mess.