Rocket League RocketIDs Delayed As Sony Warms To PS4 Cross-Play
Sony's resistance to cross-play on PS4 got a lot of attention when Fortnite launched on the Nintendo Switch earlier this year, but this is a saga that has been running far longer than that. Though the topic of cross-play is one that's come up from time to time across multiple console generations, Sony's hesitance to enable it on the PS4 specifically came to light in a big way back in 2016.Rocket League developer Psyonix actually started pushing for cross-play first, telling users that it was ready to flip the switch on cross-play between Xbox One and PS4 whenever Sony agreed to it. The problem, of course, is that Sony never did agree to it, so Psyonix merely enabled cross-play between the Xbox One version of Rocket League and the PC version and left it at that.
Fast forward a couple of years later and Sony's resistance to the idea of PS4 cross-play has been eroded away, mostly thanks to Fortnite and its large (and loud) userbase. Late in September, after months of skirting around questions about it, Sony finally launched cross-play in beta for Fortnite. Though Fortnite is currently the only game supported by PS4 cross-play, Sony's announcement in September certainly left the door open for that functionality to make its way to other games. When Sony gives the green light for the PS4 version of Rocket League, Psyonix will be ready.
Today, the company announced on the Rocket League blog that it has chosen to delay RocketID, which is the new cross-platform profile system that was originally scheduled to be out by the end of the year. Now, RocketID is scheduled to launch at some point in early 2019, but the benefit to this delay is that Psyonix is preparing it to work with PS4 as well, should Sony offer cross-play support in that game.
RocketID is a profile system that will allow players to party up and add friends regardless of platform, so a lot of Rocket League fans are definitely looking forward to it. For them, this delay likely stings a little bit, but having RocketID support all platforms is a good trade-off. Hopefully Sony will allow Rocket League to utilize cross-play on PS4, so we'll keep our eyes peeled for more information on that front.