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

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

This week, MCV is all about women in games, ahead of the Women in Games Awards next Thursday (May 19th). Interactive Selection’s MD and WIGJ’s founder David Smith as well as Facebook’s head of EMEA gaming marketing Aoife Brodigan share their thoughts on what remains to be done for women …

Super Evil Megacorp and Twitch have announced that the Vainglory Spring Season Championships for North America and Europe will be held in Hollywood and Berlin respectively. The North American Spring Season Finals will take place at the Avalon in Hollywood, California between June 3rd and 5th. Defending champions Team SoloMid …

As remarkable Kickstarter meltdowns go, this is probably the daddy. Back in 2013, Peachy Printer raised $651k to make what was being dubbed as the world’s first $100 3D printer. However, in a remarkable update, co-creator Rylan Grayston has claimed that partner and financial manager David Boe has spent $320k …

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