What Is Crossplay? How Cross-Platform Play Works in 2026

Crossplay — short for cross-platform play — lets people on different hardware, like an Xbox Series X and a PS5, land in the same match, party or server. In 2026 it's the default assumption for any big new multiplayer game rather than a rare bonus feature, but "crossplay" still means different things from one title to the next: some games mix every platform freely, some keep PC and console in separate pools, and at least one major 2026 release skips it entirely between brands. Here's what actually determines who you can play with, how account linking works, and where the setting lives on each platform.

What crossplay actually means (and what it doesn't)

"Crossplay" narrowly refers to matchmaking: can a PlayStation player and an Xbox player end up in the same lobby. It's easy to confuse with two related but separate features. Cross-progression is about your account — whether your unlocks, battle pass tier, or stats move with you if you switch from console to PC. Cross-generation play is narrower still: whether an Xbox One owner can play with someone on Xbox Series X, or a PS4 owner with someone on PS5, inside the same console family. A game can support any combination of these three independently. Elden Ring Nightreign, for example, supports cross-generation play within each console family but not crossplay between PlayStation, Xbox and PC, according to publisher Bandai Namco's own announcement.

Why crossplay used to be rare

For most of the last two console generations, playing across brands simply wasn't possible, and that wasn't really a technical limitation. According to Wikipedia's overview of cross-platform play, consoles ran closed online services that required the platform holder's cooperation, and publishers and platform owners had commercial reasons to keep players locked to one ecosystem — a dynamic one industry analysis called "powerful network effects" that encouraged repeat purchases on the same hardware. On top of that, certification and policy rules were frequently a bigger obstacle than the engineering itself.

There were early exceptions. Capcom vs. SNK 2 let Sega Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 owners compete online in Japan back in 2001, and Valve brought Steam-powered multiplayer to the PlayStation 3 for Portal 2 in 2011. But the modern crossplay era really starts with Microsoft inviting other networks to connect with Xbox Live in 2016 and Rocket League turning on Steam cross-network play that same year.

How Sony's 2018 reversal changed everything

The turning point was Sony. PlayStation kept PS4 cross-play switched off for years, and the fight became public in mid-2018 when Epic allowed PS4-linked Fortnite accounts to be blocked from logging into the Nintendo Switch version — a restriction that, per the Wikipedia account of the episode, coincided with roughly a 2% drop in Sony's stock price. On September 26, 2018, Sony announced an open beta for cross-play "for select third-party content," starting with Fortnite, and described it internally as a major policy change. Court documents that surfaced later showed Sony had been charging Epic extra royalties for the privilege.

Sony kept expanding from there: Rocket League got full cross-platform play in January 2019, Dauntless launched that May as one of the first games built cross-platform from day one across Windows, Xbox One and PS4, and by October 2019 Sony had opened cross-play to any developer willing to implement it — no more one-off negotiations. PlayStation's own leadership later framed this as a permanent stance; chief executive Jim Ryan told reporters Sony "supports and encourages cross-play" going forward.

How Xbox, PlayStation, Steam and Switch handle it today

None of the platform holders force crossplay on; they all require two layers of consent to stack before two players on different hardware can meet in a match.

Xbox treats cross-network play as a privilege the console has to explicitly check for. Microsoft's own certification requirements for developers state that a title must validate cross-network privileges before enabling any cross-network multiplayer mode, and that it must honor whatever a player's Xbox privacy settings allow before letting cross-network communication happen — the stricter of two players' settings always wins. On the consumer side, this shows up as a cross-network play privacy setting tied to your Xbox profile, and Microsoft extended the same control to Family Settings in a 2018 update so a parent can separately allow or block cross-network play and cross-network communication on a child's account.

PlayStation doesn't gate crossplay at the system level in the same code-enforced way Xbox does; the switch mostly lives inside each game. EA's own support documentation for Battlefield 6's cross-play settings is a useful real-world example: the toggle only exists in the game's own Settings menu, and EA explicitly notes "you can only view and change your cross-play settings on Xbox and PlayStation consoles" — PC players get no opt-out at all.

Steam and PC have no platform-wide crossplay switch whatsoever. Valve doesn't broker matchmaking between Steam and consoles; that's entirely up to the developer's own backend, often built with cross-platform matchmaking middleware. This is also why PC players frequently can't turn crossplay off even when console players can — there's no equivalent system-level setting for Valve to expose.

Nintendo Switch (and the newer Switch 2) follows the same per-game pattern as everyone else — Nintendo hasn't published a blanket platform policy requiring or guaranteeing crossplay, so whether a given Switch 2 game plays with Xbox, PlayStation or PC owners comes down entirely to what that game's developer built and documented.

Account linking: the part platform holders bury in support pages

Crossplay and cross-progression both usually require tying your various platform logins (PSN, Xbox, Steam, Epic, etc.) to one publisher account, and the mechanics vary a lot by game.

Fortnite is the model everyone else gets compared to: Epic's own help center explains that every player needs an Epic Games account, and on PlayStation the option sits under Settings → Account and Privacy → Gameplay Privacy → Allow Cross Platform Play, where you switch it to Yes or No; Xbox players instead manage it through Xbox's own cross-network play setting rather than anything inside Fortnite. Epic's support page also notes that turning crossplay off isn't possible on Switch, PC or mobile, and that disabling it elsewhere can push some modes into solo-only matchmaking because the queue shrinks so much.

Marvel Rivals takes a more structured approach. According to the official account cross-progression Q&A published on the game's own site, linking happens under Settings → Other → Account Binding, where you designate one "primary" character that any linked platform account can then play as. Unlinking a platform triggers a 180-day cooldown before it can be bound again, and switching your primary character starts a separate 30-minute cooldown — and critically, ranks, battle data and leaderboard position are tracked separately for PC, PlayStation and Xbox and don't merge even after you link accounts.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 ties everything to a single Activision account. Activision's own support article states that players must log in to an Activision account to play online, and that doing so is what enables both crossplay and cross-progression — your progress is stored on that account, so it carries over to whichever platform (PlayStation, Xbox, Battle.net or Steam) you log into next, as long as you don't link that platform to a different Activision account later.

Input-based matchmaking: keyboard/mouse vs. controller

One long-standing worry about crossplay is that keyboard-and-mouse players have a precision advantage over controller players, especially in competitive shooters. Few platform holders document this publicly, but individual developers sometimes do. EA's Battlefield 6 support page is explicit about it: on console, "cross-play matchmaking will prioritize other players on console," and the game only pulls in PC players "if there aren't enough players on console" — effectively keeping controller players together by default without fully walling PC off. It's a soft solution rather than a hard separation, and most games that address input disparity at all tend to use some version of the same idea rather than a strict console-only mode.

2026 crossplay comparison: who actually plays with whom

Support status below reflects each game's own official documentation at the time of writing. Cross-progression (your stats and unlocks following you) is a separate system from crossplay (who you're matched with) — note where the two diverge.

What you actually need to do to turn crossplay on

The steps are nearly identical across every game that supports it:

• Check your console's privacy setting first. On Xbox, cross-network play is a profile-level permission that can override anything a game tries to do — if it's set to block, no game-level toggle will fix it.
• Sign in with whatever account the game actually uses. That might be a storefront login (Epic, Steam) or a publisher account (Activision ID, a NetEase-linked Marvel Rivals account) rather than your console account.
• Find the game's own crossplay toggle, usually under Settings → Account/Network/System, and confirm it's set to allow all platforms rather than console-only or off.
• Link platforms deliberately if you want cross-progression, since in several games (Marvel Rivals, Call of Duty) linking the wrong account first, or unlinking one later, can trigger a waiting period before you can fix it.
• Don't expect to change settings mid-session — EA's Battlefield 6 documentation, for instance, specifically blocks changing cross-play settings while you're already in a party, server or matchmaking.

If you're also trying to decide which subscription tier gets you into these games cheapest, our breakdown of Xbox Game Pass tiers covers what each plan actually includes for online multiplayer.

What's next for crossplay

The direction of travel hasn't changed since Sony's 2018 reversal: more games launch with crossplay built in rather than bolted on later, and account-linking systems like Marvel Rivals' are getting more granular rather than simpler. Xbox has also signaled it isn't done pushing on this front — Microsoft used its March 2026 GDC announcement about next-generation Xbox hardware to frame the whole console/PC split as something it wants to erode further; Xbox's Jason Ronald said at the time that "as games increasingly span devices, we're breaking down the barriers between console and PC games for more seamless cross-device play." That's a statement of intent rather than a guarantee for any specific game — that decision still sits with individual developers, as it does today — but the baseline expectation from players keeps rising. If you're trying to figure out whether a brand-new release supports it, the only reliable move is still the same one that applies to every game on the table above: check that game's own official support page before you buy, since platform holders themselves no longer make that promise for you.

For genre-specific context on titles mentioned here, see our guides to getting started in Battlefield 6 and Black Ops 7's Zombies mode.

Written byJonah Reyes

Jonah Reyes leads Pandromeda's gaming coverage: console and handheld hardware, release dates, pricing changes, patch notes and the business moves behind the biggest franchises. He sources every date and price from the platform holders and publishers themselves, and says plainly when something is still only a rumour.

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