Daily Briefing: Thursday 11th March

Daily Briefing, Thursday 11th March 2021

Hello and welcome back to another edition of the Bellular Daily Briefing - games industry news straight to your digital doorstep

Some guy at EA has reportedly been selling off rare FIFA Ultimate Team cards

In what has already been dubbed EAGate, it very much looks like an EA employee is selling rare FUT cards for a pretty hefty price. Instant messages posted to Twitter detail the supposed employee offering bundles of rare player cards for anything between $750 and $1,700 - it looks like the employee uses the customers EA ID to add cards directly to their account.

• Everything is still to be confirmed at this point, of course, but EA are already on the warpath - stating that they "in no way condoned" this kind of behaviour and are mounting a "thorough investigation" into the alleged misconduct. If this is true it's definitely not a good look from EA - lootboxes were one thing but it'll be hard to recover from an instance of directly exploiting customers.

Capcom issue warning over Resident Evil Village early access scam

The warning states that there are currently waves of emails doing the rounds that promise early access to the upcoming horror sequel, and advises anyone who receives one to delete it immediately without opening any links, downloading any files, or replying. The sender address is no-reply(at)capcom(dot)com

• This phishing scam is just the latest knock for Capcom this year. Back in November they suffered a significant data breach which they later admitted could have compromised the personal information of around 390,000 people. There's no indication that this latest scam and that earlier ransomware attack are related.

Apex Legends is pretty rough on Switch

After a pretty sizeable delay, Respawn's popular battle royale launched on Switch this week and things aren't looking so great. A combination of low resolutions and unreliable framerates have been making it very difficult to get into the new platform release - and these issues are compounded by crossplay putting Switch players at a serious disadvantage.

• There is still cause for hope, though. The Switch version was handled by Panic Button, the studio responsible for the excellent Doom and Doom Eternal Switch ports. Both of those release received substantial post-launch support to smooth out the experience, so fans are hopeful Apex Legends will get the same treatment. You can also turn off crossplay, too.

Overwatch is the latest game to be enhanced for Xbox Series X|S, but not PS5

Overwatch's latest patch notes have detailed some nifty new performance options for Microsoft's new consoles. Resolution mode targets 4K/60fps on Xbox Series X, Balanced mode offers 1440p/60fps, and Framerate mode aims for 1440p/120fps. The less powerful Xbox Series S version hits the same framerate targets but with lower resolution and image quality.

• The odd thing is that these patch notes make no mention of a similar mode update for the PlayStation 5 version of the game. This makes Overwatch the latest game to receive a shiny next-gen update that's best on Xbox. The most recent high-profile instance of this was Jedi Fallen Order back in January - which offered multiple graphics modes on Xbox Series X but locked performance on PS5.

That's everything for today - join us back here tomorrow for another dose of daily industry news!