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

Online merchandise ThinkGeek is to open its first physical store. Owner GameStop, which acquired ThinkGeek owner Geeknet in June, has announced plans to open the its first branded physical store in Florida on September 25th. More are planned, too, with each boasting what is described as a ‘modern, bright, open …

Hollywood star-cum-tech investor Ashton Kutcher is the latest high profile investor to back international eSports gambling startup Unikrn. The company’s current round of Series A funding opened on June 30 and has already attracted other well-known investors including Mark Cuban of ABC’s Dragons’ Den-style show, The Shark Tank. It is …

Bandai Namco has said that its free-to-play fighting game SoulCalibur: Lost Swords will be shut down later this year. Eurogamer reports that the servers for the PS3 title will be shut down on November 30th, just a year and a half after the game was first launched. Sales of Continue …

Rocksteady’s Nick Arundel and Avengers conductor Allan Wilson to speak at September 15th event

Studio design director David Vonderhaar talks to us about the eSports features and multiplayer infrastructure in place forCall of Duty: Black Ops 3. In particular he discuss the Ban and Protect system, CoDcasting, and Arena play (that replaces league play from Black Ops 2) in depth. "Call of Duty eSports …

A patch for the troubled PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum was temporarily released last night, and seemed to bring with it big fixes to the game. Kotaku reports that those who had tinkered with the settings on the game’s listing in Steam to enable beta access last night received …

Gamechangers to be shown on BBC Two, despite no word of a settlement to Rockstar lawsuit

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Britishgamingfestival Insomnia is moving on up…the road, as it relocates future events from Coventry’s Ricoh Arena to the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham. The move comes as demand and attendance for the homegrown event, which merges elements of LAN parties, esports and a convention, has exceeded the capacity of …