With MUT worlds separated by hardware, will EA follow the Battle Royale example and use crossplay?
The arrival of Madden 21 is hotly anticipated as the current game winds down, but the Ultimate Team community is still locked apart from each other.
Like other sports titles, Madden 20 divides its community by hardware. Xbox players can only play with other Xbox players, PS4 with PS4 and so on.
This has been the norm ever since online multiplayer started, but those walls are beginning to come crumbling down.
Will Madden 21 bring its MUT players together?
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Cross-platform play is more possible than ever
Cross-platform play, or crossplay, has started to become more and more popular with certain genres of games. In particular battle royale games like Fortnite.
Other games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare introduced it even before Warzone dropped. Minecraft lets players explore together, and private games in Rocket League can be cross-platform too.
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Sporting games though? No chance.
There are a few reasons for this, but the main one as far as EA are concerned seems to be the Ultimate Team market place.
Madden 21 Ultimate Team could prevent crossplay
Ultimate Team, and the micro-transactions within it, drive huge revenue for EA Sports.
A lot of that revenue comes from the scarcity of high-end cards in the marketplace, which forces players to keep paying for packs to stockpile enough coins to buy the cards they want.
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The problem is that a collective MUT Auction House, rather than three separate ones across Xbox, PS4, and PC, could reduce that scarcity.
At the same time, bringing the competitive players under one roof could quickly box out the casual player as the online games become too one-sided.
As much as those paying competitive players bulk out the coffers of EA, the deep pool of casuals that might put in $20 a month is also crucial and they wouldn’t want to scare those players away.
Will Madden 21 Crossplay happen?
The very existence of Madden 21 is up in the air right now, which makes a big feature like cross-platform play less likely.
If EA were to roll out crossplay in Madden 21, it would almost certainly be in conjunction with FIFA 21. EA Sports’ soccer juggernaut suffers from the same Ultimate Team block though, so it would be a huge step if they were to do it.
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