Updated at 1:15 p.m. Pacific with comment from Activision on Share Play.
PlayStation 4’s unique Share Play game sharing only arrived last week, but it’s already come up against a big release that feels selfish.
Sony describes Share Play as being like a “virtual couch” that enables you to share games with your friends online, limited to 60-minute play periods. But if you try to use it with first-person shooter Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, released earlier this week, you’ll find that it flags the entire game as censored, blocking the option to Share Play, according to GameSpot.
Activision says that it’s disabled Share Play while engineers analyze its potential impact on gameplay performance.
“Delivering a great gaming experience for fans is our top priority,” Activision told GamesBeat in a statement. “We’re focused on launching Advanced Warfare and ensuring that people have a great time playing it, which our fans seem to be. Share Play is a new feature that was introduced as part of the recent PS4 firmware 2.00 update. Our engineers didn’t have access to it before it launched, so we haven’t had a chance to evaluate it to see how it will impact the experience across all modes of play. Of course we wouldn’t include a feature in our game without having the chance to test it. Once we’ve fully analyzed its performance, we’ll determine how to support it going forward.”
It’s not great news for Share Play, which was the big new feature included with last week’s troublesome PS4 system update 2.0. Sony had previously stated that Share Play would work across all PS4 games that use a traditional controller, and that it had no opt-out clause for developers.
“Share Play is a system level feature enabled by System Software Update 2.00, making it available for all PS4 titles; however, the option is available to developers to disable the feature according to what they feel will best benefit the consumer experience,” a Sony spokesperson told GamesBeat.
The means to censor certain scenes is something Sony offered developers if they wanted to avoid sharing spoilers across Share Play, but it seems publisher Activision has taken this much further than anticipated. It’s possible that the Call of Duty publisher thinks the option to Share Play will reduce sales on PlayStation 4, which would explain the decision to censor it completely.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is one of the year’s biggest game releases, and Activision thinks it will outsell the previous installment in the annual series, Call of Duty: Ghosts. Industry analysts, however, don’t all agree.