Hey, people.

Hi, Mikael and friendos.

Look at my friendos behind me.

What's up, Taco?

Taco.

PC crossplay with consoles maybe or never It's not never it's not maybe it's unlikely for a good while so bluntly

Removing cross-play barriers between PC and consoles right now would be something we do in tandem with moving away from the Epic backend altogether.

We have heard the feedback about people not being very keen on having to make Epic accounts if they want to cross-play on console, which is understandable.

And even if that feedback had not been the case, we still have reasons for maybe wanting to explore other backends than Epic for online play.

And these reasons mainly have to do with the fact that if Epic suffers, let's use Fortnite because Fortnite is probably still the biggest like Epic activity in terms of multiplayer games.

If Fortnite has issues that affect the Epic online services or like huge updates or emergency fires that break out,

Fortnite is causing, just example game, any game could be causing this, but Fortnite for, you know, the biggest example, if Fortnite is causing this and Epic servers go down or maintain or whatever, it's not shutting down for Fortnite only, it is shutting down for everything.

So sometimes when you can't access the servers at all, that's not because we have turned them off or Epic is just, like, broken or something, that's because they are currently fixing something else entirely and we just happen to be on the, like, you know...

on the same little node as whatever game that they are managing otherwise is being fixed.

Stuff like that is making it kind of annoying to be on the Epic backend recently.

And so we are talking about maybe, and this is like we're talking, we're not doing this anytime soon,

But moving away from it would mean that we could also simultaneously much easier open up for cross-play between PC and consoles with some barriers in mind, mainly regarding mods.

So then why aren't we doing it?

Why aren't we if that's, you know, something we could do to both open up cross-play and make life for ourselves easier and you guys easier?

That's because the dev time that we need to allocate for that is equivalent to putting up

Like a couple of a couple of updates that are way bigger than 1.1.

So, you know You could either have the epic back and replace with something else or you could have two pretty chunky updates or maybe even one like I shit you not like one Expansion if we were to do an expansion instead of that so, you know, it's very much picking our battles

and

If we get to the point sometimes where we're like, yeah, this is the final stop for Satisfactory, like for now or for a good while, then absolutely the Epic backend could be something we look at instead.

Instead of pushing out new content, but that's not anytime soon.

Just admit you don't like the console players.

I'm a console preferrer.

If I could go back in time and restart Final Fantasy XIV, I most likely would do it.

I wouldn't do it on console.

I would do it on PC with a controller.

That's what I would do.

That's what I would do.

I'll take the expansion, please.

I'm sure you would.

I'm sure you would.

Because I would too.

play 14 on pc with controller nice i feel bad for you if you do top or like any of the uh even like through through relatedly with uh rotating your character or aiming very carefully monitors in top's case and ice slides in shiva's case my condolences otherwise it looks

fun

Arguably the most frequent question we've received.

Will there be crossplay between console and PC?

In short,

No.

I know, I know, I know.

While you will be able to crossplay between PlayStation and Xbox, we have a good reason why it won't be possible with PC.

This is basically our thinking.

Our PC players have a lot of freedom to modify their game.

They can raise limits, use save editors, and even use mods to push the game past its intended scale.

We've all seen Let's Game It Out.

Hey, can you imagine the game running worse than it did before?

Because guess what?

It does.

Like, a lot worse.

This freedom is a part of the PC experience, and it's something we've embraced over the years.

If players can make it work, they're free to experiment.

On console, the situation's different.

Console makers expect the games on their platforms to run reliably most of the time, and console gamers typically don't have the same tools that PC players do to troubleshoot their crashes or their corrupted saves.

So let's say a PC player modifies their game.

For example, raising object limits to build a massive factory.

Then they decide to invite their console friends into their session, where their clients are almost assuredly going to crash.

Because of this mismatch, combining the two platforms into one cross-play environment will put console players at risk of instability caused by the freedoms that we allow PC players.

So that's the main reason we decided to keep the ecosystems separate.

So PC players can continue enjoying that freedom, and console players can rely on a stable, consistent factory experience.

There are some smaller, less philosophical reasons as well.

It would be quite a large undertaking to set up the basic infrastructure for these two platforms to play together, including optimizations of existing optimizations and potential reworks of entire features.

The list goes on.

We're not closing the door on it forever, but with our current desires to keep making new features for Satisfactory, getting this to work would take all hands on deck for a really long time.

Whew, that was a lot.