The developers should just pick up the phone.
Well both need to simply talk candidly, whoever is picking up the phone. There's clearly a breakdown in communication somewhere, and I do think that's Sony's fault.
Here's one supposition:
This came out of nowhere for Sony pretty quickly (per Layden himself).
Sony came around on the
business policy sometime thereafter
However PSN's codebase is a millstone around their neck - a legacy codebase that's a brittle ball of spaghetti (i think a reasonable suggestion given all else we've seen wrt certain new features and the speed of their delivery)
Sony has been trying to refactor it (I guess), and has been trying to stay more or less feature locked for a while to facilitate that (again, I guess).
While cross MP itself might be a 'switch' on the game end, it sounds like Sony is handling the issue as play/saves/purchases in one, stuff that would require backend work.
Sony needs to 'go slow' on the rollout because they lack confidence in the robustness of their code - confidence that changes won't break stuff
The process currently is not automated, and Sony is handholding devs through it and wants to monitor games carefully in case they crop up issues
That creates a manpower bottleneck in QA and dev relations - people who also have lots of other tasks/responsibilities
However, in communicating to developers what's going on, it's obviously embarrassing for Sony to discuss technical shortcomings, so devs are left somewhat in the dark about why things are going 'slow' - and then wonder if the slowness relates to policy more than anything else.
Sony - in knowing all the issues that might be going on behind the scenes (that I'm hypothesizing are going on), has one set of expectations around timing, and devs have a completely other set (i.e., quite reasonably, they want it NOW), and so you have mismatched expectations.
I don't think it's half-heartedness about the business policy at all. That doesn't make sense to me. Sony's prior policy was rooted in protectionism of network effects/Metcalfe's Law. It doesn't make sense to blow that open for big games and then worry about the impact of 'little' games. The genie is completely out of the bottle via the big games, the 'additional damage' these games would do is trifling.
(Side note: contrary to some commentary earlier in the thread, Layden is not skirting responsibility at all for Fortnite etc. He clearly states it's something that was down to them, and that prior policy was 'unfriendly')
So Sony, in short, needs to be more proactive about keeping devs updated on progress - on progress regarding the whole project, even if progress on a developer's own game hasn't been made, and even if it's embarrassing to be completely candid about
why the process is the way it is. They need to get these features to a point where they're battle-tested enough that devs can use them automatically, without manual oversight. And, if I'm right about the root causes, they need to
continue refactoring their PSN codebase into something tested, flexible and agile, so that they're not operating with a millstone around their neck in the future, and can react speedily with more technical confidence that stuff won't break...whatever the next 'crossplay' is.
