Microsoft’s cross-platform functionality has gone live on one of their most popular titles to date. Gears of War 4 has opened up the ability to swap between Xbox One and Windows 10, meaning that players can battle it out against each other in versus mode, which is now available in the Social Quickplay playlist. This announcement was made on Xbox’s website, in a news.

This move to cross-platform game play is expected to be a permanent move, as a part of Xbox’s Play Anywhere program, which was announced last year. With the official launch of this platform-to-platform conversion, Liam Ashley, Community manager for The Coalition, stated in his news post, “Late last year, we conducted a cross-play Test Weekend to bring our Windows 10 and Xbox One fans together in public Versus Multiplayer, combining fan feedback and extensive data gathering to help us decide the next steps to take to deliver a matchmaking cross-play Versus experience.” He also released the test-period’s top stats, which you can see below:

• Over 750,000 Matches Played
• Over 115,000 Unique Participants – 91/9 split from Xbox to Windows 10
• Average of 6.2 matches played by Xbox users, with 11.2 for Windows 10 users
• Over 90% of all matches during the weekend included a mix of Windows 10 and Xbox One players
• Windows 10 and Xbox players had closely-matched results when comparing Average KD, Score and Kills per match based on skill ratings
• The quality of matches improved for both Xbox and Windows 10 users – social lobbies had a higher average user count, and players completed 95% of all social matches entered vs 90% prior to Cross-play Weekend
  

While this cross-platform mechanic is a big step in bringing together players in ways unprecedented, Ashley did state in his post that the game’s Core and Competitive playlists won’t support cross-platform play. The reason behind this choice is simply to ensure that gamers who are paired up, will be paired with other players of equal rank.

Despite the closely matched performance between users on both platforms seen in our cross-play Test Weekend, we always want to ensure our Ranked experiences are as closely matched and competitive as possible. Due to the major popularity of Social Quickplay on Windows 10, we will be looking at introducing new Core and Competitive solutions for Windows 10 players in the future to provide more focused offerings to experience the more competitive ranked play of Gears of War 4.

Gears of War 4 isn’t the only game to make it official on Microsoft’s Play Anywhere list. Resident Evil 7, the latest installment in Capcom’s monster series, has also been added to Play Anywhere, showing that Microsoft is just one step closer to an all-inclusive gaming experience to keep all players connected in ways never thought possible before. So, if you’re a Gears fan, make sure you check out the official listing on Xbox’s Social Quickplay and get in the game!

What do you think of the game’s addition to cross-platform functionality? Have you had a chance to try out the functionality for yourself yet? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, and game on!