Daily Briefing: Thursday 14th October

Ubisoft delays new Ghost Recon beta immediately after reveal

A few days ago, Ubisoft announced Ghost Recon: Frontline and it...didn't go over so well. Frontline is a 100-player free-to-play shooter taking inspiration from the battle royale genre with a pinch of Escape from Tarkov thrown in for good measure. In other words, it's a game that absolutely no fans of Ghost Recon's historically tactical, squad-based shooting will have been asking for. Fans have responded by downvoting the game's first trailer into oblivion, which in this instance is pretty understandable.

• So, mere days after the game was first announced, Ubisoft announced that its first test period has been delayed indefinitely. Their actual confirmation of the delay is pretty vague in itself, not saying much to actually explain the delay beyond saying that it's the right choice and that the "development team is dedicated to creating the best experience possible." It's also not clear what Ubisoft hope to achieve with a delay - it's not like a few more weeks in the oven is going to change the game's overall direction. And Ubisoft really needed the Ghost Recon series to bounce back after the disaster that was Breakpoint.

Activision reveal new anti-cheat measures for Call of Duty

Activision Blizzard have been teasing new anti-cheat measures for the Call of Duty series for a while now - since Vanguard was first announced back in August to be exact. That new system was revealed earlier this week and it's called Ricochet. The new system will debut alongside Call of Duty Vanguard at the start of November and will come to Warzone later on as part of the Pacific update. The Call of Duty series, and Warzone in particular, have had a serious hacking and cheating problem in recent years and Activision and their cabal of Call of Duty slave studios have repeatedly highlighted their zero-tolerance policy.

• In a new statement published to the official Call of Duty website, Activision outlined that "the Ricochet Anti-Cheat initiative is a multi-faceted approach to combat cheating, featuring new server-side tools which monitor analytics to identify cheating, enhanced investigation processes to stamp out cheaters, updates to strengthen account security, and more." The post also confirmed that Ricochet will have kernel-level access on PC which, if you remember Valorant's disastrous launch, is probably quite a worrying prospect. Activision thought of that though, and Ricochet's reveal confirmed that the software will not be always-on.

ResetEra acquired by MOBA Network

The gaming and community forum, one of the biggest on the internet, were acquired for a tidy $4.55m. Around $3.55m of that total has been paid in cash with the remainder due to arrive before the end of the year.  There will reportedly be no changes to the operational and moderating teams. This seems like a pretty solid purchase given that ResetEra reportedly made $700K in sales last year.

• MOBA Network are looking to pursue an expanded form of ad revenue - which is how ResetEra have traditionally made their money. MOBA want to introduce new types of ads and generally up the share of direct ad sales. They want to see massive growth in 2022 and it'll be interesting to see how they go about that. ResetEra has a pretty bustling community but messing around with ads to push subscriptions might not go down so well. Then again, MOBA Network own a stack of other website and online communities and networks so they probably know what they're doing.