Who's the audience in this situation?
Gamers
its pretty black and white...either you pay us to enable crossplay or we dont let you do it...that how that tweet read which had the email
you can sit here and defend sony defending its market position and wanting money for microtransactions all you want to but for a company that literally uses the line for the players as part of their marketing its more about the payers than the actual players
this type of thinking has seeped into other areas which is why the current way they operate or have been operating is a clusterfuck of brilliant and downright shitty
people would also bring up the MS example but there are 2 things very different about it...1 they were not asking developers to pay to enable crossplay (that we know of) and 2 the xbox live infrastructure was miles better than sonys at the time and if my memory serves me correct it was around the same time
as the sony hacking scandal...nobody wanted to touch that shit or be involved with a service that had so many holes.
Crossplay has been probably the best thing for gaming as it brings gamers together on all platforms