Among the many announcements at E3 was Fortnite (Free) making its way to the Nintendo Switch, which was quickly available for download following Nintendo’s media event. The excitement surrounding the latest Fortnite port was quickly extinguished when players began discovering that Sony locked Epic accounts to their platform. In a nutshell, if you ever played Fortnite on a PS4, even if you just played for an hour over at a friend’s house on their console, your account was permanently locked out of playing on other consoles including the Nintendo Switch.
This caused the internet to explode, as the Switch seems to have fallen into the role of “beloved second console that people who own a Xbox or PS4 likely also own," so loads of folks were hit by this. Many (myself included) expected a swift resolution from Sony with some way to unlock your account, but the only official response from Sony has been somewhat baffling and can basically be summed up as, “deal with it."
Late last night, the former president of Sony Online Entertainment shed some (somewhat obvious) light on the situation:
btw when I was at Sony, the stated reason internally for this was money. They didn't like someone buying something on an Xbox and it being used on a Playstation. simple as that. dumb reason, but there it is.
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) June 18, 2018
It’s basically what many of us expected, but it’s just sort of amazing seeing someone who used to have such a high rank inside of the company come out and admit the reasoning behind these decisions. Admittedly, John holds no official title inside of Sony anymore, but it’s still pretty amusing to see someone in the know being so blunt about the situation.
