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

Former Industrial Light & Magic exec Jody Madden promoted to new role

Evolution and Lionhead’s collapses have shaken the UK sector, but also led major studios to offer help

Following MCV and Develop’s third Interface event, we round up the biggest learnings from our schedule of speakers and panels. 1. ‘A great Kickstarter is 50 per cent having a great idea and50 per cent being able to convince people you can finish it’ This year’s Interface kicked off with …

CEO Alex Schwartz explains how Owlchemy Labs made the tedious terrific

A record-breaking number of gamers played the beta for Blizzard’s upcoming release Overwatch. Over9.7m consumers tried the team shooter, making it Blizzard’s biggest ever beta. Not only that – 4.9bn minutes of gameplay (more than 81m hours) were played. Comparing this to the performance of other betas – over nine …

UK’s University College London and Manchester Metropolitan University among new locations to establish dedicated virtual reality labs

Vega joins from PlayJam, Innogames hires head of PR and Climax scores new art director. Curve Digital appoints new business dev manager John Vega has joined the London-based publisher as business development manager. Vega previously held various positions at games network PlayJam: he began as a QA and integration analyst …

An extensive and excellent report on Eurogamer has shed light on what it was like to work at Lionhead. Among the dozens of fascinating snippets it reveals (including that Microsoft had several offers for the studio prior to deciding it would be closed – a fact MCV knows to be …

Ubisoft’s new online shooter The Division has 9.5m registered users. That’s according to the publisher’s latest financial report. Note that this does not mean that 9.5m people have bought The Division, but rather that number of gamers has played it (one copy can be played across multiple profiles). CEO and …

Cancellation of upcoming mobile games blamed for rumoured 80 jobs lost – approximately half of studio