I really hope that cross platform play will happen between consoles/PC as a standard, part of me doubts it ever would because a decent part of a consoles success is that you have to get it to play games with your friends.

But it would be so great if you could...although I would care less about it if you couldn't find your friends that were on different ecosystems.

Looks like someone never played CoD or GTA online on PS4.

This is a good thing!
Now the hard part MS: following through.

This is the beginning of the end of the segregated gameplay between systems. maybe within 3-4 years there will be AAA games with this capability.

I have seen other sites making it sound like MS are leaders in this.

I'm sure it's not the first time that the party who's inaction has stopped progress , is then credited as the catalyst for that progress , rather than the long time  advocates , still their change of mind is to be congratulated.

This could be big for Nintendo.  One of the problems for nintendo has been that people buy a console that their friends have so they can play online with them.

It's an issue for FPS. PC COD players would rape console COD players. It would pretty much ruin console FPS gaming.

I noticed quite the difference when I switched from 360 to PS3 in terms of the amount of trash talking I heard from the tv. For starters, PS3 wasn't bundled with a headset. Secondly the console launched at a much higher price point and was less prone to be picked up by parents for their kids, but rather by those that wanted one personally. The closest statistics I could find within a relative timeframe peg the average PS3 user at 28, and the average xbox user at 20. If that is indeed true then PS3 gamers would have been generally more mature. The data comes from 08-09. Bearing that in mind, I'm sure these demographics have shifted to a degree but without further analysis there's not much else to say.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Xbox-Live-Users-Worry-About-the-Economy-96312.shtml

http://kotaku.com/5350396/playstation-networks-typical-user-is-28-male-educated-moneyed

It's certainly not the first time but throughout the gens we've seen come and go with people choosing and picking who did what first and then turning around to say those who started it first didn't matter as long as the one who did it last perfected what was started first (easily the whole Wii stick to PS move topic than eye Toy and Kinect).

That's what I'm talking about. With mobile, there's people who play with touch controls versus people play with a usb controller on almost every major FPS game. On the Wii, they were people playing with pointer controls going against people playing with traditional controllers all the time.

 It never became an issue on those platforms, so I don't see why it would be an issue in this scenario.