Phil Spencer on Sony’s reason for blocking cross-play: “That doesn’t seem healthy for anyone”

There's been a pretty big controversy brewing this week surrounding Xbox, PlayStation, and a little game called Minecraft. At Xbox's E3 show, they revealed Minecraft would allow cross-play across almost every platform including the Nintendo Switch. The reason we say "almost" is because there was one platform that opted-out, PlayStation.

Fans were really upset to hear this and demanded to know why PlayStation wouldn't do it and the reason is: They're concerned about the safety of their players… Yeah, it's a bit of a head scratcher. Not only do Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo include in-depth parental controls for their platforms, the new Minecraft update will add additional parental controls in-game to make sure no one is potentially exposed to inappropriate content.

After hearing this, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer had some things to say about it on one of Giant Bomb's shows.

"The fact that somebody would make an assertion that somehow we're not keeping Minecraft players safe … I found, not only from a Microsoft perspective but an industry perspective, I don't know why that has to become the dialogue," said Spencer when speaking with Giant Bomb. "That doesn't seem healthy for anyone. We can always do better with anything we do."

"I found the whole discussion around safety with our game and that somehow we wouldn't take that as a top priority and frankly, through our parental controls on Xbox Live and everything else that we've done, shown that that's incredibly important to us as a platform."

Spencer noted that they're with Nintendo who is notorious for being a tad overprotective in some spots.

He went on to talk about how important the safety of their players is and how the team at Xbox would never do anything to jeopardize that.

"We take the safety of Xbox Live, the players across all of our games, the players inside Minecraft, it's incredibly important to our team and the work they do around the parental controls. We'd never put Minecraft in a place where we felt we weren't keeping our players safe." said Spencer

Spencer wanted to be clear and say that they are always open to allowing cross-play with PlayStation and they hope they'll make it work in the future.

"My hope is that they join the party as well," Spencer said, "because I think it's an awesome thing to do for gamers."

[PlayStation Trophies]