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

New release Godus Wars has taken less than 24 hours to run into bother. Peter Molyneux and his studio 22Cans announced and released its second Godus title yesterday. The Early Access game costs 10.99 to download and includes the original Godus – which itself has yet to exit Early Access. …

Broadcaster opens new games IP to Portland-based devs and aspiring creators

Japanese publishing giant Square Enix has revealed that net sales from its games business shot up 46 per cent over the last year. This news comes as part of the company’s financial report for the nine months ending December 2015. The entire company saw a 28.5 per cent jump in …

Thomas Was Alone dev transitioning more to management in the wake of Volume

King producer Andreas Olofsson tells us how his team mixes up the match three mechanic with each new release

The first full year of tax relief for games makers has seen more than 200 approved titles, with almost half passing final certification. The BFI hasannouncedthat 237 games were approved for Video Games Tax Relief in 2015, which marked the first full year of the legislation since passing in April …

£729m spent by eligible devs during first full year of financial support

Aside from the time it takes, the biggest pain from transcribing an interview is spotting the points you failed to jump on at the time and the jokes you missed and didn’t laugh at. In this instance, I‘m annoyed that I didn’t catch Mike Bithell’s ‘non-fascistic purity’ joke and didn’t …

This year’s Salary Survey highlights how little has changed in games industry pay packets – despite a rise in the number of independent businesses. 29,000 was this year’s UK average salary, which is the exact same number as last year, and broadly in line with the previous two (2014: 30,400 …

A shock announcement from November 2015 was that Activision Blizzard is to acquire mobile company King.com. And even more eye-opening was that the Call of Duty publisher is spending $5.9bn to buy the Candy Crush maker. Just to put that into perspective: Disney purchased the Star Wars franchise from LucasFilm …