[2019] How RL's cross-platform play impacted my college

To preface, I am the "president" of Iowa State University's Rocket League community, which I originally began as a freshman just over two years ago. At that time, cross-platform play wasn't a thing, and it was difficult to try and grow a community solely out of PC/PS4 players, when I had a good amount of Xbox players also wanting to participate in events, but simply couldn't. Even PS4 players found difficulty due to the fact that cross-platform parties didn't exist, and therefore could only play together in private matches.

Well, since cross-platform play has been established, I just wanted to share what it has done for my school and community.

Iowa State's Recreation Services (in charge of running intramurals) reached out to Iowa State's gaming club regarding hosting the first ever esport intramural. Without a dedicated gaming facility, this was something where players would need to provide their own equipment/consoles to play the games online. Luckily, Rocket League had just become fully cross-platform and the introduction of Rocket IDs and cross-platform parties made Rocket League the game of choice for Iowa State's first esport intramural.

Now, my Rocket League friends and I had said we would have been blessed to even hit triple digit players to signup. Not only did we break 100 players, but we ended up with over 150 teams, consisting of over 450 players. And lo and behold, these players came from all 4 platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One, and yes, even some players competed via their Nintendo Switches!

The whole event was a tremendous success, and I had some other RL players from other colleges ask me to type out the process we went through for any other schools interested in running their own intramural. So below is a link to the Google Doc I made where I run through everything that we did to organize this event: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SLOODgDUmwlFDRwhbPbnYJb418HFKdvARw4k8XsuL_Y/edit?usp=sharing

Thank you Psyonix for making such an incredible game, and for getting it to be one of the first fully cross-platform games. Hope you enjoyed this read!