Daily Briefing: Thursday 23rd September

Fortnite effectively "blacklisted" from Apple devices

Following a ruling finally being passed in the dramatic Epic v. Apple lawsuit not so long ago, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says that Apple will blacklist Fortnite from their development ecosystem until the end of the appeals process. This could be anything up to five years, which is a pretty long time for Fortnite to be put in time out.

• Speaking on Twitter, Sweeney said that “Apple spent a year telling the world, the court, and the press they’d ‘welcome Epic’s return to the App Store if they agree to play by the same rules as everyone else.’ Epic agreed, and now Apple has reneged in another abuse of its monopoly power over a billion users.” Though Epic appealed the court's decision, they also agreed to "adhere to Apple's guidelines" provided their developer account was reinstated. Apple reportedly denied this request, which led Sweeney to accuse them of lying.

Respawn offers a glimmer of hope for the future of Titanfall

Even with all of Respawn's success in recent years with things like Apex Legends and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, there are still a lot of fans holding out hope for a new Titanfall game. Things haven't looked too positive, but this week the developer tweeted that Titanfall "is the very core of our DNA," something that made a lot of fans excited.

• We shouldn't get too carried away, though. It's very possible that Respawn's tweet was actually a response to an earlier statement by community coordinator Jason Garza. Asked about Titanfall during a recent livestream, Garza said "don't get your hopes up, man. I've said this before. We don't have anything in the works. There's nothing. There's nothing there. We've got too many other games in the works right now." This is obviously pretty deflating so it would make sense that Respawn would like to sprinkle a bit of positivity on things. Star Wars and Apex Legends are obviously the moneymakers these days, but maybe we really will get more Titanfall one day.

Upcoming Xbox update will let you resurrect your old Xbox 360 Gamerpic

In an unexpected by welcome update, Xbox will soon allow you to fetch your ancient Xbox 360 to use on modern consoles. Microsoft engineering lead Eden Marie revealed on Twitter earlier this week that Xbox Series X|S players in the Xbox Insiders Alpha Skip-Ahead group should now have the option of retrieving the last Gamerpic they used on their 360 back in the day. This means the return of all those old avatar snapshots, which is nice.

• Marie announced the upcoming update after making it her "personal mission" to solve the issue of old Gamerpics shrinking between console generations. The fix snowballed into a fully-fledged update that will allow a lot of people to recapture the glory of 2005. Also, Marie gets to tick a bizarre item of the team's to-do list, which really must be an engineering dream come true.