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

Riot has banned three teams from its League of Legends competitions and handed one team owner a permanent ban. Team Impulse, Renegades and Team Dragon Knights have all been banned from the LCS and must now sell their slots in the league. Both Renegades and Team Impulse competed in the …

Bandai Namco has shipped 3m copies of From Software’s action RPG Dark Souls 3, following its release in March. Gematsu also reports that total shipments for all three games in the Dark Souls series have now hit 13m units. This does not include Sony-published pair Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne. Dark …

Imagine a game in which your character doesn’t even know how to breathe by himself. He doesn’t know how to stand, walk, put on pants, brush his teeth or even blink. Well, meet Sam, the hero of Perfectly Paranormal’s Manual Samuel. After being hit – and killed – by a …

Non-commercial client follows launch of compositing, editorial and finishing software NUKE for free

Nintendo has confirmed that its next two smartphone titles will be free-to-play. Smartphone outings for Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem were confirmed last month. Now Wall Street Journal reports that both DeNA chief executive Isao Moriyasu and a Nintendo spokesperson have confirmed that both will be free to download. Nintendo’s …

Stainless Games’ Carmageddon returns next month with a new console title that promises the most impressive vehicular destruction since the car combat series debuted almost two decades ago. James Batchelor straps in to find out how the game’s steel-shredding effects were accomplished

’90 per cent’ of interested parties walked away when Microsoft refused to sell Fable IP, sources claim

Space strategy title Stellaris has been an instant hit for publisher Paradox Interactive. The game has in its first 24 hours on sale sold over 200,000 units. That’s actually slightly short of the 250k copies sold by Paradox’s former release Cities: Skylines, but Stellaris’ higher price means that it represents …

Development often sacrifices narrative strength at the altar of technical achievement, leaving titles with clichéd plots and lifeless dialogue in favour of visual panache and mechanical complexity. Writer Steven-Elliot Altman reveals how studios can give games a story worth telling once again

EA has said that a sequel to Star Wars: Battlefront will be released in 2017. Its enthusiasm is undoubtedly buoyed by the success of the first game, which in EA’s last financial year (ending March 31st) saw 14m copies shipped. That’s well ahead of the 13m EA forecast back in …