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

The CEO of Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear developer Beamdog has spoken out against the harassment aimed at some of its developers. The game sparked fury this week by having the audacity to include a transgender character. The studio has said that it feels the idea may have been better …

If you’re a fan of plastic instruments, the last week’s headlines haven’t made pleasant reading. First, Activision announced it would be ‘restructuring’ (read: making a lot of redundancies) its FreeStyleGames Studio – the makers of Guitar Hero Live. Then, yesterday, Harmonix’s crowd-funding effort for Rock Band 4 on PC failed. …

Crowdfunding push shows there is not enough of an audience to justify port

Shawn FMPONE” Snelling is a professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive level designer and community contributor. Snelling has had five levels in CS:GO, including his most recent project, Santorini, which was included in Operation: Wildfire. Snelling also collaborated with original authors Ted McIlwain on Season and Salvatore Volcano” Garozzo on Cache. Yahoo …

A few weeks ago Dylan Walker of Yahoo eSports spoke a bit about the distinction between independent contractors and employees in eSports. As the world of eSports has slowly become more legitimate and professional, teams and companies have started to contract with their workers. Some teams have unwittingly been classifying …

It’s that time of year again: the World of Tanks Grand Finals are almost upon us. The world’s best teams are rumbling down the streets of Warsaw, Poland, where they’ll face off against each other over the weekend of April 8-9 for a slice of the $300,000 prize pot. The …

The year is 2008. Baltimore is playing host to Pound 3, a major event boasting over 200 players. Legends of the day are doing their best to traverse through the bracket. Jonathan "Plank" Graybeal is running the event, making sure people report for their next match. Names such as PC …

The race to create the world’s premier Counter-Strike league is well and truly underway, and Twitch are the latest to announce their effort. Twitch has partnered with tournament organizer FACEIT to create the Esports Championship Series (ECS), a $3.5 million Counter-Strike league which will launch later today. The league, which …

Developer Harmonix has ditched the PC version of Rock Band 4. The firm announced this on its Fig page for the project, observing that there isn’t a large enough audience to make developing for this platform viable. This follows Harmonix’s crowdfunding effort for Rock Band 4 and the Rock Band …

The developer of underwater survival adventure Subnautica has explained why the game does not equip players with guns to defend themselves. I am sorta confused at all the non-lethal items that are in the game to fend off predators and the only lethal thing I know of is the knife,” …