Yeah, to try and write something wiki-style about it to make all the facts clear:
Gems of War would like to support cross-platform play across all platforms. But not every platform has been historically friendly to it, currently what exists is “for VIP customers only”, and GoW itself needs some work for full cross-platform.
The politics of the situation revolve around Microsoft and Sony wanting to keep their console players exclusive with respect to each other. Microsoft actually promotes XBox/Windows cross-play to some extent, but Sony has actively rejected it as a feature. However, some games like Fortnite are so big they’ve had to relent. Gems of War is not that big. So until PS4 is advertising cross-play as a blessed feature for every game, it’s very unlikely GoW can afford to negotiate it with Sony.
The community might have a bone to pick, as well. XBox and PS players have been used to having their own leaderboards and guilds for a long time now. It’s objectively true they aren’t as able to collect tribute as mobile players, and generally accepted that they are at a bit of a disadvantage.
So right now, we can imagine the game is split into three isolated shards. PC/Mobile play on one shard, XBox plays on another, and Sony plays on the last. You can link multiple devices on the same shard, but that effectively means only the PC/Mobile shard gets something that feels like cross-platform play.
There are still reasons to leave information about account linking, though.
- You can have multiple PS4s or multiple XBoxes.
- If your console breaks, the account link system is how you recover your old account.
- The account link information is useful for support if your account is corrupted and you need to recover it.
- If Sony/MS ever do bless cross-platform play, the devs don’t have to update the client to make it work.