David Thier here writes that opening up Xbox Live to work cross-platform is the perfect move against Sony to negate the huge advantage in player numbers and thus friends buying what platform their friends have....

He does however (conveniently) forget to mention that each game has to impliment the feature themselves, there is no switch MS can press to make every game cross-platform. 

Link to the article;

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2016/03/14/microsofts-dare-is-a-brilliant-jab-against-sony-and-the-ps4/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix#5d0d4fcc4b46

In my opinion one of the reasons for MS doing this is to create news like this. Sony won't want to hand over control of their online traffic and so will likely not allow it with several games MS mention (in the coming months/years). This will switch the narrative to try and make it look like it's Sony standing in the way of progress. 'MS want it but bad guy Sony won't allow it.' Watch.

I think the perfect move would be to get rid of the Xbox Gold requirement for online play.

I bet that will happen. I also don't care for Xbox cross platform play, don't see where I would take advantage of it. Rocket League? 7 million PS4 owners have that game, no problem finding games. Same with the popular shooters. FFXIV? Already have cross play with pc and not on xbox (yet) and doubt xbox will make a dent in the player count.

Yeah, it also deflects some of the negative press they got for the studio closures for now. But I can see how it would set up that narrative. It is a simple message that people can understand (MS want xbox to work with everything) but if Sony say "well that benefits MS but it impacts us negatively in a business sense", people don't even try to understand as it doesn't effect them. 

They'll need to prepare PR to answer this one down the road.

That would have been a major counter but it would result in MS having to disclose console sales, most likely. Cause right now they are saying subs reflect revenue better.

This is definitely a PR move by MS because they have nothing to gain by it or lose by it in relation to console sales. What it does do is give them a possitive bullet point, and they're currently in desparate need of that. The ONLY problem is MS are going to struggle to hold down this assumed possitive when Sony have been allowing cross play for years. The new forum war has just emerged ... Oh, God.

I thought the main reason for this kind of move is to allow games that might have low player counts on individual platforms join the platforms together to gain a larger one overall. This won't change things like CoD or FIFA. I'd presume they will remain the same as ever. MS allowing such a thing is good PR for them in line with what Sony already wanted to do (right?).

I didn't realise it was a reason to make Sony out to be bad guys when they say 'no' to a game that doesn't need it when MS are pushing for it.

Like you say, it's up to the developers, not MS or Sony in the end.

People like you will never be happy with everything! Microsoft can do what they want and people like you will always act like Microsoft is the bad guy. Believe it or not, but what Microsoft is doing is something good for gamers and the games industry. And if Sony doesen't want to support cross play than it's just fine!

Edit: And it's always the same, if Microsoft trys to evolve than it's a PR thing or the apocalypse. But when Sony does nothing like always get hyped to the stars!

Jab? The article writer doesn't know what jab is. One is struggling and trying to recover by all means but it's not working. Backwards compatibility and many other stuff didn't helped Xbox One much. And PS4 keeps jabbing every month in terms of sales.