This E3 has been a good one for many who are fans of playing online games with friends and strangers across different console and PC platforms. Psyonix announced that a newly announced Switch version of Rocket League would be able to interact with existing versions on the Xbox One and PC. And Microsoft announced that online Minecraft players would soon be united across Switch, Xbox One, PC, mobile, and VR platforms.

Missing from both of those lists is Sony's PlayStation 4, which will keep its players segregated to the PlayStation Network for the time being.

“The honest answer is PlayStation has not yet granted us permission," Psyonix VP of Publishing Jeremy Dunham told Polygon regarding the reason for the Rocket League's cross-platform block on PS4. Since Psyonix runs its own servers and since those servers have already been certified for Microsoft's strict technical and security requirements for tying in to Xbox Live, adding PS4 is "literally something we could do with a push of a button, metaphorically," he added. "In reality it’s a webpage with a checkbox on it. All we have to do is check that box and it would be up and running in less than an hour all over the world. That’s all we need to do.”

Minecraft Communication Manager Aubrey Norris piped in with a similar sentiment on Twitter, saying, "we would love to have PlayStation players along with the unified Minecraft, hope that we can."

Speaking to Eurogamer this week, Sony's Jim Ryan said the company doesn't have "a profound philosophical stance" against cross-platform play and pointed to previous examples of such play between PlayStation and the PC. For Rocket League and Minecraft, however, "it's a commercial discussion between ourselves and other stakeholders, and I'm not going to get into the detail of that on this particular instance," Ryan said.

"We've got to be mindful of our responsibility to our install base," Ryan continued. "Minecraft, the demographic playing that, you know as well as I do, it's all ages but it's also very young. We have a contract with the people who go online with us, that we look after them and they are within the PlayStation-curated universe. Exposing what in many cases are children to external influences we have no ability to manage or look after, it's something we have to think about very carefully."

That excuse seems a little weak to us considering that even the usually overprotective Nintendo is comfortable connecting Switch Minecraft with other platforms. But we digress...

Since Microsoft first made a big push for cross-platform play on Xbox Live over a year ago, Sony has said it is "happy to have a conversation" with developers on the matter. In the months since, though, developers have continued to stress that Sony itself is the only remaining barrier to getting the PS4 connected to outside platforms for their games.

"We also do have a technical solution in place for PS4 and would love to add Sony’s platform to cross-play at the start of open beta," CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwiński said last year regarding Gwent. "All we need is a green light from Sony."