'Overwatch' crossplay is live now

Crossplay is live in Overwatch. With today's game update, folks on PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch can play Overwatch together, with a few caveats.

First, in order to enable crossplay, all players are required to create a Battle.net account — something that console fans were able to avoid until now. Second, PC and console players will be able to join matches together in Quick Play, Arcade and Custom modes, but not Competitive.

Here's how Blizzard describes the matchmaking process for competitive games: "Competitive players will be split into two pools depending on the system that they are playing on: 1) Console players, and 2) PC players. For balance purposes, PC players and console players will not be mixed in the same pool for competitive matches."

By default, console players will only be matched against other console players, even in Quick Play. The only way you'll find a game with console and PC players is to purposefully group up with folks on those platforms. This is similar to the crossplay system used by Apex Legends.

Finally, while today's update rolls out crossplay capabilities, it doesn't unlock shared progression among consoles. This means cosmetic items and stats are locked to specific platforms, and won't transfer among sessions on different consoles.

In addition to crossplay functionality, today's patch increases the amount of damage that some heroes deal on consoles, in an attempt to provide parity with the PC version. The affected heroes are Ana, Ashe, Symmetra and Torbjörn, all of whom previously saw decreases in their damage output on consoles.

It's been five years since Overwatch first came out, and crossplay has been one of the most-requested features from players since day one. Well, that and Overwatch 2 — which is still incoming, though likely not this year.