MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry

French publisher Ubisoft has outsold all of its competitors across a number of key territories so far in 2016. It says that NPD data shows that is has for six months been the top publisher by sales year-to-date in 2016. This applies to Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. In …

Having previously hooked up with others for its print ambitions, Ubisoft has announced its own book publishing operations. Ubisoft Publishing will release its debut item, Assassin’s Creed: Heresy, on November 15th. Thematically it stays close to the games, interweaving a modern day Templar tale with a 14th century plot involving …

Retailer Green Man Gaming is offering up three PC games for 1 as part of a promotion with this year’s Golden Joystick Awards. By voting on this year’s awards event – which takes place on November 18th – players can claim Specs Ops: The Line, Sid Meier’s Pirates and a …

Around half a billion Yahoo accounts were compromised in a security breach in 2014, it has been confirmed. The hackers, whom Yahoo has said were state-sponsored, accessed names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and even security questions and answers, as were encrypted passwords. The news could very well cast …

Two years ago Facebook began to throttle back the organic reach of brand page posts, compelling marketers to invest in paid ad campaigns in order to reach the audiences they had so carefully curated up until that point. But look, that’s absolutely fine. Facebook has invested millions of dollars in …

Mafia should really be 2K’s biggest franchise. It has a brilliant name and is an open-world crime game, which is perhaps the most popular genre in the world. It certainly sounds like it has more potential than 2K’s other huge sellers, such as the stylised, and frankly unusual, Borderlands and …

Worldwide event will run from Friday, October 14th to Saturday, October 15th

The co-owner of 4J Studios has joined Team17 as a non-executive chairman. Chris van der Kuyl joins the firm following LDC’s 16.5m investment in the Worms creator. 4J Studios is best known for making the console versions of Minecraft. I’ve known Chris for a few decades and this is the …

As the studio’s platforming throwback Yooka-Laylee continues to take form, Playtonic Games’ Gavin Price tells James Batchelor why making retro-style video games is tougher than you might think

The senior producer on Watch Dogs 2 says that the titles has been bolstered by a ‘shorter communication cycle’. The first Watch Dogs was announced in June 2012 and released almost two years later, in which time the title had changed slightly – particularly visually. It resulted in criticism from …