Playing Fortnite on the PS4 used to mean that your account couldn’t then be used on the Switch or the Xbox One, but those days are over. Even better, Epic Games will give you a way to merge accounts.
Sony has announced that cross-platform play is coming to PlayStation 4, starting with Fortnite. But cross-platform play wasn’t the real reason people were upset about how Sony was handling Fortnite accounts. The anger came from the launch of Fortnite on the Nintendo Switch during E3 this year, when players found out that any account that had been played on the PlayStation 4 couldn’t be used on the Nintendo Switch.
Not being able to play with your friends on other consoles was one thing, but being blocked from playing with your account at all on Nintendo Switch or Xbox One because you used it on PS4 is another. It felt like we should have been warned never to play Fortnite on PlayStation 4 if we wanted to play on Switch at a later date.
The good news is that Sony and Epic Games have removed this limitation from the account system, and now you’re free to use your single account on every console you own. It’s a correction to a problem that never should have existed, or should have at least been communicated long before it caught us by surprise.
Epic Games is also taking care of players who had to open a second account to play Fortnite on multiple consoles.
“For players who created an extra account to play Fortnite on multiple console platforms, we’re working on two things,” Epic tweeted. “1) An account-merging feature to combine Battle Royale purchases, coming in November. 2) Enabling unlinking a console from one Fortnite account, and relinking to another Fortnite account. Coming in a few days.”
So if you had to make a new account to play on Switch or Xbox One due to after playing on PlayStation 4 locking out your original account and made any purchases on that new account, you’ll be able to merge the two. These fixes aren’t yet live, but it’s clear that Epic Games is taking the original situation seriously.
It could often be frustrating to watch the conversation revolve around cross-platform play when the issue being discussed was locked accounts that couldn’t be used on Xbox One or Switch after being played on the PlayStation 4, but now even that isn’t an issue.
This is a big step in the right direction. Even players who never really cared about cross-platform play are likely to be happy that their Fortnite accounts are now completely portable. We’ve tested it with our hardware in the office and, yep, it works. Social media is also filled with reports of players who can now use their account everywhere, although it seems as if this feature might be rolled out in a measured manner throughout the day; we had issues getting our accounts working on Switch this morning.
But now? No sweat.
