September 14, 2018 Jeff Kaplan says the Overwatch team is still trying to make cross-platform profiles happen.
PC is the best place to play Overwatch and no, we’re not at all biased. But if you want to play across multiple platforms – maybe your friends prefer consoles – you aren’t able to transfer your level progress or cosmetic unlocks between accounts. That’s frustrating if you’ve dumped your hours into one version and gathered a selection of favourite skins that you can’t use elsewhere, and Blizzard is “not crazy” about that either.
Addressing the lack of cross-platform progress on the forums, Jeff ‘from the Overwatch team’ Kaplan says the team is trying come up with a fix, but it’s a bigger challenge than it might seem. “We’re not crazy about that. We’re brainstorming solutions. It’s complicated…”
This came back up thanks to the Demon Hunter Sombra skin which, oddly enough, is available across platforms. If your Battle.net account is linked with your console profile, you’ll get the skin across both versions of the game – which raised some questions about why this isn’t possible more generally on the Battle.net forums.
That post echoes what we heard in our interview with Jeff Kaplan earlier this year, and it sounds like this a problem the Overwatch team has been looking to solve for quite some time.
“This is something that we have ongoing and frequent discussions about with our tech group,” Kaplan says. “It’s something we would very much like to explore. It’s very challenging for many reasons, and I won’t get into all the details as to why, but I think it’s a very valid desire that our players have and it’s something that the Overwatch team would love to figure out. We will continue to work hard on it to make it happen someday, if we can get around some of the challenges that we’re faced with.”
Cross-platform play is certainly unlikely for Overwatch, given how reliant the PC edition on precision controls, but apparently the cross-platform profile dream isn’t dead – but it may take awhile to come to life.