I'll never forget when I was a bright-eyed young gamer and home consoles were starting to boast online play. I loved the idea of sitting at home on the couch and playing with my friends a few suburbs over.

I’d always been a PC gamer, but this new wave of consoles intrigued me enough to buy one. Of course, I had to decide if I wanted a PS2 or an Xbox. The deciding factor came down to what my friends had, and what games we could play together. The going was tough, and it was a pretty harrowing choice, but I ended up with a PlayStation 2, and that decision cemented my loyalty to Sony to this day.

“ It's funny that gaming is what we all have in common, but it's also what drives a wedge through our community.

For generations now, gamers have been defining themselves by console choice; the PlayStation and Xbox camps gnashing their teeth while PC gamers sit back and watch with an air of superiority. And that’s without mentioning the Nintendo fans - jumping up and down with renewed vigour because the Switch might let them compete in the third party scene again… We’ll see.

It's funny that gaming is what we all have in common, but it's also what drives a wedge through our community. Wouldn't it be amazing if the platforms we played games on were more open? The concept of cross-platform play has been a hot topic for a few years now, and crops up with almost every large multiplayer, multi-platform release. And it seems like an obvious solution to boost player numbers and unite the gaming community.

Personally, I think this unified gaming utopia would be wonderful, but it's also about as realistic as BioShock Infinite's floating city of Columbia – and here's why.

To your left is PlayStation Nation, while on the right, you can clearly make out the Xbox Spires.

The gameplay reasons

To start our discussion, let’s look at gameplay and the concept of a ‘level playing field’. Two members of the Overwatch development team spoke in late 2016 (below) about how their netcode is built on a “favour the shooter” mentality. That means if the server disagrees with where two players were standing when a shot is fired, it favours the shooter over the person dodging.

This is a pretty common solution as it makes the shooting more rewarding for that player and that keeps people playing.

But to take it a step further, let's say that you have two players – one on PC and one on console. The console player has either a PS4 or an Xbox One controller and the PC player has a mechanical keyboard and a 12,000 Dpi laser mouse.

There are definitely pros and cons to both setups, the console player for instance has much finer control over their character's movement and direction because both consoles allow you to tilt to walk, and push farther to run. However, that 12,000 Dpi laser mouse is far more precise than the thumbsticks on a controller, giving a skilled PC player a massive advantage. The official Overwatch Twitter account, for instance, responded to a query about the possibility of console vs PC play with "Mixing mouse/keyboard and controller can have balance and competitive issues."

Beyond that, if you're looking at an FPS like Overwatch, Battlefield 1 or Sniper Elite 4, there are even more ways that PC players can gain an advantage.

The console player's game is static, playing as intended to give the best console experience. But the PC player can tweak internal settings for an advantage. What if the PC player turned off shadows, increased the field of view, bumped up the draw distance and turned down foliage, smoke, bloom and effects? Suddenly the console player has a gorgeous but cluttered battlefield to shoot through, while the PC player can see farther, wider and more clearly than his console counterparts.

You could easily end up with two players who have different control schemes, different visibility and a server that favours the shooter. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that bullet.

No thanks.

The technical reasons

Online multiplayer is hard. Having worked with game developers and spoken to many teams over the years, I can safely say that coding a multiplayer game is a long and arduous process. So, when you add in the oversight of a platform holder like Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft it's easy to see why this process could get even more complicated.

“ Remember late last year when Steam users and Windows Store users couldn't play together in Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare?

As a simple example, remember late last year when Steam users and Windows Store users couldn't play together in Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare? It seems utterly ludicrous that two friends playing the same game on PC couldn't play together. But that’s what happened, and the only real justification was that Steam and the Windows store weren't compatible in the back-end.

That then leads to the bigger question - what if I want to play Battlefield 1 with my friend, but he only owns an Xbox One? Now we're talking about multiple walled garden ecosystems.

At the time of writing, PlayStation users find each other by Playstation ID. That means knowing the ID of someone, sharing it with someone else and searching for them over the PSN. Xbox users have their Gamer Tags, which work in much the same way. And despite reports to the contrary, Nintendo is still using 12-digit friend codes. That means a lot of back and forth, networking infrastructure and compatibility to unify these systems. Or you could get Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to agree on a standardised social layer that plugs into all their platforms - just to find the guy you work with online.

"On the screens? Yeah, that's my Nintendo friend code."

When you look at games that currently support cross-platform play like Rocket League

suggesting that the service is currently active , Psyonix hasn’t clearly described how to add other network players to your game. And even after I personally worked out how to do it, and discovered that PC and PS4 definitely CAN play together right now, it isn’t a publicly announced feature.

What you need to do is set up a private match, locked with a server name and password, then have the other players search for exactly that server and password before they can join the private match. It feels like a glorified appropriation of TCP/IP multiplayer from the 90s. And since you’re in a private server it completely locks cross-players out of competitive games, tournaments or even just staying in a party together against other random humans.

Beyond that, maintaining friends lists and unifying the social offerings of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would need an unprecedented amount of coordination between the three titans. Which takes us to the third reason cross-platform play isn’t likely any time soon...

The business reasons

Competition between major corporations is a strange thing. Some companies are happy to produce their goods and have their market share; others aren't.

Back in 2015 Burger King (Hungry Jack's to us in Oz) came to McDonald's with a proposal that the two titans join forces in honour of Peace One Day. All McDonald's needed to do was accept the proposal and work together.

McDonald's was also responsible for this.

It was a momentous PR move on behalf of Burger King, filled with flair, a custom site and doubtless plenty of effort. However McDonald's wasn't so forthcoming, and shunned the idea with a somewhat passive-aggressive Facebook response, suggesting “A simple phone call will do next time”. Burger King came out on top, they won marketing and PR awards, and McDonald’s looked sour and confrontational.

What does that have to do with games and gamers? Well last year Microsoft made a similar move and extended an olive branch to Sony.

Around GDC in 2016, Microsoft announced that moving forward they would let developers build cross-platform and cross-network play into their titles. This effectively opened the door for developers to bridge the gap between PlayStation and Xbox.

The first game to support this was Rocket League, allowing Xbox One and PC Players to play together with “an open invitation for other networks to participate as well” *wink, wink*, *Cough* Sony *Cough*.

Rocket League - destined to be the one true faith.

In August of 2016 IGN spoke to Jim Ryan from Sony about the possibility of playing ball with Microsoft (Rocket League pun intended), and the official line is: “It's really down to the developer and publisher of a certain game to come and talk to us and we're ready to have that conversation.”

It's a rather non-committal response that puts the onus purely on developers to make the first step. It also doesn't give any indication as to whether that means ticking a box on an application or an indie dev trying to force the two biggest gaming companies to sit in a room and talk netcode.

Because this is one hell of a big thing, it wouldn't just mean getting Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to work together on one release, if we're talking multiplayer then they would need to work together over a long period of time. They would also need to coordinate the rollout of patches or else quarantine parts of the player base when a new fix rolls out. And work together from here 'til the end of time to ensure players can find each other and connect.

So that's the state of cross-play in a nutshell. We've got two industry titans squared off, both ready to do business but neither making the first real move, while the PC population looks on from the sidelines. The idea of gamers of different stripes competing on virtual battlefields - as opposed to in forums - is a noble one. So too is the idea of gaming's dominant brands putting aside their differences for the good of the community.

Is it going to happen? I'm not sure, but I hope so.

Nathanael Peacock is a freelance games journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Why not say hey on Twitter?