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

The fourth episode of Minecraft: Story Mode is set to launch later this month, Telltale has revealed. Telltale confirmedthe first season’s penultimate episode will launch later this month across all platforms, adding that the fifth episode is scheduled for a vague 2016 window. More details are said to be on …

Finland-based mobile studio Traplight Games has closed a recent round of funding totaling €1.3m. Games Industryreports the second funding round brings the Big Bang Racing developer’s lifetime total to €2m. The studio’s racing game is based around user-generated content – which has gone well enough for the studio to prioritize …

Mighty Switch Force Academy has launched out of Early Access on Steam, developer WayForward has announced. The indie studio boasts the official release packs 20 new levels, five classic stages, as well as four-player co-op and competitive play. WayForward debuted its Mighty Switch Force property as a puzzle platformer release. …

Straight-laced, stiff upper-lipped, very-sensible middle class British High Street retailer John Lewis has got all modern, like, by adding a virtual reality headset to its shelves. It’s called the Freefly VR. It costs 49.95 and can be found on the fifth level of the store’s flagship Oxford Street outlet. The …

FreeSync is freeing itself of the need for a DisplayPort connection. AMD’s technology synchronises a PC’s and monitor’s refresh rate (the number of different frames shown on the screen every second), providing for smoother visuals and responsiveness. Until now both FreeSync and Nvidia’s equivalent tech G0Sync have required PCs to …

$10m inaugural funding will be investing in VR and AR projects that could 'transform the world'

Blizzard says that heroes and maps coming to its team shooter Overwatch after the game is out will be entirely free. In a video on the Overwatch YouTube channel (below), game director Jeff Kaplan addressed questions from the title’s community, specifically how the developer would be approaching post-release content. Kaplan …

Batman: Arkham Knight studio seeking lead and senior network programmers

Nintendo has announced that the next wave of Animal Crossing Amiibo figures will be coming to stores in UK very early into 2016. Via the Animal Crossing Twitter account (below), the platform holder revealed that the toys-to-life figures would be launching on Friday, January 29th. Four figures have been confirmed …

Online portal gives devs access to integrations for GitHub, Photon, Appuri and more