Randy Pitchford, Gearbox's head honcho, announced that crossplay support for Borderlands 3 is ready on all platforms but it will have to be removed from PlayStation 4 and 5.
Sony's reluctance to support crossplay continues. Gearbox's Randy Pitchford took to Twitter to announce that Borderlands 3 crossplay is ready for all supported platforms but the feature will have to be removed from PlayStation consoles. He noted that the decision was made by the publisher and that 2K required them to do so.
However, the wording in Pitchford's tweet hints at Sony being the root of the blockade, rather than 2K. After all, the publishers wouldn't be incentivised to invest in a feature that will get scrapped later on. Then again, it's highly possible that they didn't want to pay Sony royalties for offering the feature on PlayStation systems.
Even though the company budged partially by allowing PS4 and PS5 owners to play with other platforms in games that support crossplay, it was recently revealed that they decided to charge developers and publishers for it . These royalties were apparently Sony's way of combatting revenue lost through crossplay, with the main argument being the danger of their high player base purchasing things on other platforms.
Anyway, Pitchford's tweet does not specifically state this is the reason but the fact that they built crossplay support for Sony's platforms and are now giving up on using it implies that the decision was made recently.
Gearbox Software
The news about Sony charging for crossplay came to light about a month ago so it's possible 2K will try to leverage the newfound public knowledge against the tax no other platform forces, to our knowledge.
