UPDATED:

Activision has responded to requests for comment regarding Share Play not being supported in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. They claim that the decision was made because their engineers didn’t have access to test the new feature before launch. They haven’t ruled out support for Share Play in the future, further details can be found in their statement below:

“Delivering a great gaming experience for fans is our top priority,” the company says in a statement we received via email. “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.”

ORIGINAL STORY:

It’s been confirmed that Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare doesn’t support the PlayStation 4’s new Share Play feature. This feature was recently added to the PS4 via the firmware 2.0 update and allows friends to share their games online in various ways. Sony had earlier stated that this feature would work on all games aside from ones that require additional peripherals. It is now known that developers have the ability to disable the feature on their games.

In speaking to GameSpot, a representative from Sony said:

“Share Play is a system level feature enabled by System Software Update 2.0 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.”

Users report that Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Call of Duty: Ghosts both block Share Play functionality. There’s no word yet if other Activision titles will block this feature, or if other publishers will do the same.

My Opinion:

This isn’t good news for the Share Play feature, but it’s not a surprise to me as Sony doesn’t want to anger the game publishers. I really don’t see many games blocking Share Play as most publishers realize the value in exposing more players to their games. We also know that gamers are a vocal group and publishers like to avoid negative press, so it’s probably best if they don’t block features from their consumers. I don’t buy Activision’s reasoning for not including support for the feature as it’s a system-level feature and works on other past games without any sort of developer support. Share Play is a very cool innovation and I hope it doesn’t suffer because of this.

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Ryan Amirault is an Associate Writer for MONG and was someone who thought COD: Ghosts was the best in the series. He looks forward to playing Advanced Warfare at some point but his wallet isn’t allowing that anytime soon! Follow him on Twitter.