Daily Briefing: Monday 18th October

FIFA want greater competition in sports games

Following recent news that EA Sports are considering rebranding their long-running and overwhelmingly popular football series amid a dispute over the ongoing naming rights, football's governing body FIFA have suggested that they're open to working with other developers. In a new statement, FIFA outlined that they are "bullish and optimistic" about their long-term future in both gaming and eSports, and went on to clarify that "the future of gaming and eSports for football stakeholders must involve more than one party controlling and exploiting all rights." Take that, EA.

• This push towards wider and more varied competition in the gaming space appears to be already underway, as FIFA confirmed that "technology and mobile companies are now actively competing to be associated with FIFA, its platforms, and global tournaments." It's hard to imagine a sports gaming world without the traditional EA-made FIFA titles but it looks like that could be a very real possibility. News emerged a few weeks back that EA were considering a name change due to FIFA reportedly charging them $1bn to use the name for four years. EA also recently filed a number of trademarks for EA Sports FC, which is a...pretty weak name, to be honest.

Twitch assure users of "minimal" impact from recent hack

Twitch got hacked into oblivion a wee while back and, at the time, the streaming giant were worryingly uncertain about the scope of the breach. The official communication hasn't really been too great, with many users only being made aware of the breach after Twitch had already taken a couple of steps to rectify it. Well, over the weekend the platform released a new blog post confirming that the breach at least didn't expose user passwords.

• Throughout the post Twitch assures user that the actual material impact of the breach is "minimal" and only affected "a small fraction of users." On passwords, Twitch says that they are "confident that systems that store Twitch login credentials, which are hashed with bcrypt, were not accessed, nor were full credit card numbers or ACH/bank information." Twitch emphasised immediately following the breach that the platform does not store full credit card numbers, but a little bit of extra reassurance in that area is nonetheless welcome.

Kingdom Hearts on Nintendo Switch is Cloud-based, producer unsure of future native ports

A few weeks ago, it was confirmed that Kingdom Hearts' Sora will be the final character added to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. To round out the presentation announcing his arrival, Nintendo and Square Enix revealed that all of the Kingdom Hearts games (well, except Melody of Memory) will be headed to Switch in the form of Cloud versions. While fans were pleased at the prospect of being able to play the series on the go, they were a little disappointed that it'll be available online via the cloud.

• In response to this Kingdom Hearts producer Ichiro Hazama said that it was "quite difficult" bringing the games to the Switch at all due its limited storage capacity. In a new interview with Nintendo Life, Hazama said that "at this moment in time, the production of a native version is undecided...we believe that the Cloud version is currently the best way to deliver the Kingdom Hearts series to Nintendo Switch." So there you go.