MLB The Show will go multi-platform in 2021, the baseball league has revealed today in conjunction with a multi-year contract extension for Sony San Diego to continue developing the series. The league tweeted a press release with the caption "Today @MLB, @MLB_Players, @SonySanDiego and @PlayStation announced multi-year, multi-platform video game partnership extensions @MLBTheShow."
Additionally, the league announced the series will go multi-platform "as early as 2021" for the first time ever. They promised more details to come at a later date. That means the upcoming MLB 20: The Show, which will launch alongside the start of a new baseball season next spring, will be the last PlayStation-exclusive sequel in the series for the foreseeable future, giving baseball-starved fans outside of the PlayStation ecosystem a chance to play a true MLB sim for the first time in years.
Though the press release does not mention which platforms will host the series, Twitter accounts for the Xbox and Nintendo teams both shared the news, implying that the series is bound for all of Sony's major competitors. "No more away games," said the official Xbox account, while Nintendo quote-tweeted the news and captioned it with a simple baseball emoji.
This news follows just hours after Sony tweeted a new trailer for Minecraft which features PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch players all playing together thanks to the new Bedrock Update finally arriving on PS4, giving the game full cross-play spanning its many available platforms. It seems the landscape is changing.
MLB: The Show has been developed for Sony systems since 1997 under the more simply titled MLB, before adopting The Show as its subtitle in 2006. It has been the only true to life MLB sim since EA's MVP Baseball disappeared in 2005 and Take-Two's MLB 2K followed suite after its 2013 iteration. The latest version of MLB: The Show earned Mighty scores on OpenCritic, with an average of 86 from 35 critics.
