this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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It's more complicated than that. Technically, you're right, if the game entirely relies on steamworks for networking you can only play with people on steam. A lot of indies/AA actually just did that for a while because they just connected players P2P (so, no dedicated servers, which would necessarily be "outside" of steam's ecosystem) and crossplay was too complicated, so there are a lot of multiplayer games out there that you literally can't play crossplatform, at least in a user friendly way (shadow warrior 2 comes to mind, where you can actually connect the GOG version to the Steam version by entering a console command and knowing the other guy's IP).
Big publishers like Ubisoft definitely had the developers and the money to roll out their own crossplay architecture and code very early though, and they absolutely did. Basically, if the game has dedicated servers it most likely has crossplatform.
Nowadays a lot of UE games just rely on Epic Online Services for crossplay. I think you can actually use it with non-UE games too but there might be licensing shenanigans involved.
r6s isn't unreal though, it's anvil.
Yeah but you're not gonna see many AA or indie games made with anvil. My point was that your original assumption that a game using steam networking won't be able to "talk" to the same game using another platform's networking is somewhat correct, and basically still is the case for games that can't afford crossplay solutions, with the notable exception of EOS.
i don't know if that was ever the question. rather it was whether they've chosen to split them up or not.