 So, a hot button topic stemming from E3 this year was how Nintendo is a little bit ahead of the game compared to Sony when it comes to things like cross-play. And as much as I hate talking about this topic yet again, Nintendo of America's Chief Corporate Communications Director, Charlie Shibata, or Shibata, I'm not exactly sure how he pronounced his last name. He was interviewed by VentureBeat and had some very interesting things to say about their cross-play. So, let me just get into the relevant quotes for this particular topic. So, GamesBeat, which is VentureBeat's video game segment, asks him this. I was just with the Sionics guys, I played Rocket League on the Switch, I wish it was out now. Charlie Shibata says, it's a great game. GamesBeat goes, it played great on the Switch too. But I was talking to the developer about the struggles with cross-platform multiplayer on Sony's console, Xbox One, PC, and Switch can all play together, but Sony won't allow PlayStation 4 players to join in in that. How is Nintendo ahead of Sony when it comes to something like this? Charlie goes on to say, they're a great partner. Our publisher and developer relations team is always talking to different companies and seeing what we can work out. I'm really happy just as a gamer, let alone working for the company, that it's going to be possible, that cross-platform play. We're trying to be more flexible as a company. We're reaching out to try and get people to interact with our IP, that's some big words there. In this case, Rocket League is their IP on our system, but we're trying to get people involved with us in any way that we can, whether that's on mobile now or through Universal Studio Parks or through licensing deals like with vans. Once you can play the games and interact with the characters, if you're already a fan, you know it exists on our dedicated systems. But say you're somebody in another country that doesn't have access to these dedicated systems. You have a phone though, and you can play that way. And all of a sudden, you're in our world. We're trying to be more flexible and bring more people in. In the case of Rocket League, it's just being flexible and working with them to make their game come to life on our system. If people want to play cross-platform, we want to enable that. This is coming from Nintendo of all people. So games beat goes on to say, even Minecraft though, Microsoft comes to you guys and says it can do cross-platform multiplayer, and Nintendo just agrees immediately. Charlie answers, if it's right for gamers, we're going to entertain it. If we can make it work, we're going to do it. Game speak goes on to say, that makes a lot of sense. It seems like what you're saying is, we have ways we're selling our products that are beneficial to gamers. They want to enjoy our characters, they're falling in love with our characters. We want to give them every opportunity to do that. We don't want them borrowing our system because their friend owns a switch. And that's the only way to play Minecraft or Rocket League with them, Charlie responds. We want people to have a good time. In the case of Rocket League, that's what the people like yourself. You just said you love the game and want to be able to play cross-platform. We said, let's make it happen. It's really not more complex than that. Every game is different. Some games are great for multiplayer. Some are better for single-player experiences. Some are better in all kinds of situations for all kinds of games. Rocket League works best with cross-platform play. Let's make it happen. Games beat then says, so it's not a policy. It's not as if every game 100% of the time will be cross-platform. But in most cases, you guys can see a way around it. A way to do it, Charlie responds. It always comes back to the developer too. In this case, the developer is into it. So let's make it happen. We tend to give most of the decisions in terms of what functionality to use for a system. For example, the gamepad back in the Wii U days or motion control for the Wii. We place those decisions in the hands of the development team. Obviously, Rocket League team wanted to go cross-platform. So we said, let's do it. Holy crap. Let's just digest what I just read. There's a lot of stuff. Essentially, Nintendo is being extremely progressive here when it comes to cross-platform play. They are essentially saying, look, if a company wants their game to be cross-platform play on Nintendo Switch, it's going to happen. Nintendo is not dictating it can't happen. Or you need to do this. You need to do that. X, Y, and Z are like, look, you want to do it, we're going to make it happen. That is awesome. That is the type of things you want to hear from all video. I wish Sony and Microsoft and AMD, Intel, whatever. I wish all these companies would come and be like, look, we are going to be progressive to make this cross-platform thing a reality. Nintendo is fully on board and it's very refreshing hearing this from Nintendo because Nintendo is not perfect, right? Nintendo Switch still doesn't have its online system launched. It still doesn't have achievements, which is standard across the rest of the industry, but not with Nintendo. They right now have a wonky way to do voice chat in Splatoon 2 that Reggie did say during E3 is just an option from a third-party company. That might not be the way it is. Whatever we don't know, either way, voice chat happens through an app and that seems regressive or not even regressive, just really weird, not necessarily progressive. Let's give the standard and then more. It's more like, we're not even going to give you the standard voice chat. We're just going to completely change the game with voice chat and I honestly think it's a bad move, but whatever. That's Nintendo still trying to be Nintendo, right? Trying to do what everyone else is doing but do it in their own way and that doesn't always work out. But this is really refreshing because Nintendo is basically saying we're not going to put up those barriers for third parties. If they want to have, say, Assassin's Creed Origins, wants to come to Switch and have cross-platform online play with the PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox, Nintendo's going to be totally cool with that. They're not going to have any problems, they're going to put up any barriers that are going to prevent that from happening. If Call of Duty wants to have cross-play, if really any company wants to have cross-play, this is wholly, cross-play is wholly beneficial for gamers. It brings the community for a single game together regardless of platform. That's huge and especially huge for Switch because let's say the Switch only has, you know, a 6 million install base by the time Rocket League comes out. It won't matter. It won't matter if only like 10,000 people buy Rocket League because those 10,000 people have the millions of other people that play Rocket League to play with. Not counting PlayStation 4, of course. So it's very interesting how progressive Nintendo, it's almost like Nintendo recognizes and, you know, Venture Beat here was very forthcoming and mention, you know, Sony's not doing this, like, we don't get it. Nintendo's really being that progressive and yes, they really are. Nintendo is slowly, at least as past E3, you know, I don't know who won E3. I hate talking about the winners and losers from E3 in terms of like what company ended up dominating the show. Well, what I can say coming out of E3 is that we now know that Nintendo is taking this third-party stick pretty seriously. Even if they don't have the platform that's as powerful as maybe, you know, some third-party's won. It's not that 4K system. It's not, you know, enabling necessarily easy porting from the PlayStation 4 per se. But at the end of the day, Nintendo is sitting there saying, look, beyond all the hardware stuff, we are just looking at third-parties and saying, look, whatever you need that's on our current platform, let's make it happen. You want that cross-platform play? Let's do it. I mean, look at what he previously said. We're reaching out to try and get people to interact with our IP. We're trying to be more flexible. In the case of Rocket League, it's just being flexible and working with them to make their game come to life in our system. If people want cross-play, we want to enable that. That's awesome. Like, in response to Minecraft, if it's right for gamers, we're going to entertain it. And if we can make it work, we're just going to do it. This is, oh man, this is a battle cry from Nintendo. You know, I hate console wars, I hate flamboyism, and I know this whole thing with Sony started to bring up a little rift. The funny thing is the rift really just hurts, well, it doesn't just hurt, but it primarily hurts Sony gamers, but man, it's hard for me to believe as I sit here in 2017, coming off how Nintendo has acted over the last 15 years in this industry. When they were leaders of the industry, when they were losers in the industry, like with the Wii U, it was very interesting watching Nintendo not really change their attitude like, oh, we just had a bad idea, we didn't execute it correctly, we're going to nail the next idea. And Nintendo's always been like on this island, right? Doing their own thing, not caring, I mean, Voice Chat's almost an example of that, like what they're doing in Voice Chat with a phone app at Nintendo on an island being Nintendo doing Nintendo like things. But then there's the other side of Nintendo that really cares about the games, and this Nintendo is, the side of Nintendo I didn't think existed. I honestly didn't think Nintendo would ever get to a point that it would start reaching out to companies, reaching out to third party devs, being like, look, what do we need to do for your game to come to our platform? Oh, you want cross-platform play? Not a problem. Wow. Nintendo, how can you do anything but applaud? Wow. I'm just in shock. This is Nathaniel Ruffa Jantz from Nintendo Prime. If you liked this video, you know what to do. If you disliked it, hit that dislike button, subscribe for more, and comment below if you would like to possibly see me respond. 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