Guilty Gear Strive is a fighting game, and therefore, most of its fun is fighting human opponents. When this game was announced and players had a taste of its heavenly netcode, the franchise’s popularity suddenly grew like never before. Although the netcode is an important factor for the success of Strive, it is just one of the many needed things to create a big, united player base. Guilty Gear Strive crossplay is one of the heavily debated topics within the fighting game community due to its importance in keeping the game alive.
Is Guilty Gear Strive Crossplay?
Unfortunately, Guilty Gear does not have crossplay, meaning Steam and PlayStation players won’t fight each other. When it comes to Sony’s consoles, Guilty Gear Strive does offer cross-generational play between the PS4 and PS5. The PlayStation versions are nearly the same, but the PS5 exclusive version does have better loading times and higher resolution. Besides that, and perhaps a few other graphical improvements, there really isn’t any other difference between the two versions. This must be why it was much simpler for Arc System Works to implement crossplay there.
At first, most of the fighting game players were hopeful that the developers would announce Guilty Gear Strive crossplay with Steam at some point. However, all their hopes were crushed since a pre-purchase FAQ was published. There, developers commented on crossplay with PC, saying that this feature will not be included in Guilty Gear Strive. In their own words, “there will be no support for crossplay with the arcade and Steam versions.”
Although some games pulled it off, like Street Fighter and Power Rangers, crossplay is a much more complex issue than most think. It involves making different operating systems work together to deliver the same experience no matter your platform. Many licensing and monetization issues must be dealt with as well.
All that is left now is to hope that developers change their minds. Perhaps with Guilty Gear Strive‘s popularity growing, a patch might come in the future that changes our current reality. This is a franchise known for many editions of the same game. Maybe one of those will allow for crossplay from PC to PlayStation.
