Xbox Head Phil Spencer Wants Cross-Platform Banning

Cross-platform gaming has helped many gaming communities thrive by bringing players together. To make that experience even better, Xbox boss Phil Spencer wants a cross-platform banning program.

Spencer shared his thoughts in an interview with The New York Times. There, he noted both the difficulty of creating such a program. “Something I would love us to be able to do — this is a hard one as an industry — is when somebody gets banned in one of our networks, is there a way for us to ban them across other networks?”

If that didn’t work, Spencer said he would be up for players simply being able to bring their personal banned users list from one platform to another. “And I’d love to be able to bring them to other networks where I play. So this is the group of people that I choose not to play with. Because I don’t want to have to recreate that in every platform that I play video games on,” he said.

Spencer’s idea isn’t unheard of. For example, Activision players may have their accounts banned across multiple platforms for certain behaviors. But this only works for Activision games and Activision accounts. For Spencer’s plan to work, we would need the cooperation of different companies and different networks.

Ultimately, do you think cross-platform banning is a good idea or a bad idea? Be sure to let us know in the comments!