Battlefield 6 players says they got banned from Steam forums for sharing a config tweak that lets PC players disable crossplay, and yes, PC players can disable crossplay

Consider this a two-for-one PSA for Battlefield 6 players on PC who don't want to share their battlefields with the console squad: It's possible to disable crossplay on PC, and you might get banned from the Steam forums for talking about it.

The whole thing first came to our attention by way of this Reddit thread, in which someone claimed that their friend had been banned from the Battlefield 6 community on Steam for posting a message explaining how to disable crossplay in the PC version of the game. Anything on the internet that begins with "my friend said" triggers immediate suspicion, but the image of the ban message looks legit, and more to the point the listed fix does apparently work.

My friend make a post on steam about disabling crossplay on PC and here is a result from r/Battlefield6

This is notable, because while the console versions of Battlefield 6 lets players toggle crossplay on or off, the PC version—so I'm told, I can't run it myself so I can't check—cannot. Which seems very odd to me, although I suppose it makes sense if EA expected PC sales to lag significantly behind consoles: Maybe the worry is that if PC players limit themselves to their own pool, the relatively small number of players might result in a less-than-ideal experience.

In any event, what is not odd to me is the idea of PC players rooting around in config files to make the game more to their liking. It's literally what we do: Dicking around with config files has made things better in Metal Gear Solid Delta, Fallout 76, Stalker 2, Dragon Quest 11, Mount and Blade 2, and countless other games; I had to edit a config file in the year 1998 to make NPC pathfinding in Baldur's Gate suck less. (And it worked!) In this particular case of Battlefield 6, the config file flip is even less remarkable than many other such examples because it's just emulating a function that console players have built into their menus.

So why, then, was the guy who posted it banned—not from Battlefield 6, to be clear (there's some confusion on that point), but from the Steam community? Some of the language is less than flattering, but the likelihood in other threads seems to be that a moderator was having a bad day and made a bad call. Whatever the reason, it doesn't seem to be a matter of policy: Someone else posted the same crossplay-disabling instructions in a different Steam discussion thread more than three hours ago, and the message remains up and untouched.

Here's how to do it, by the way, in case something happens to the embed above: Using a text editor, edit the C:\Users\'your profile'\documents\battlefield 6\settings\steam\PROFSAVE_profile file; add "Gstgameplay.CrossPlayEnable 0" (without the quotes) at the end of the file, then save it. That's it! Battlefield 6 crossplay is disabled, and you are now officially a fully fledged PC gamer. Congratulations!