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

The company formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment is getting a new boss. VentureBeat reports that John Smedley is leaving his position at the H1Z1 and Everquest developer, with current COO Russell Shanks to take on the role. It appears that he intends to stay with the company. I can …

Nintendo has emerged victorious after a company claimed that the platform holder’s handheld consoles infringed on its patent. The Quintal Research Group nailed down a patent in 2008 for a ‘computerized information retrieval system’. Such a system, the patent proposes, is described as having a generally rectangular shape, with a …

COO Russell Shanks to take over as Smedley takes time off in the wake of cyberattacks

John Broomhall talks with Limbo’s audio creator Martin Stig Andersen

This week, MCV has asked people from around the games industry for their tips on surviving Gamescom. Publishers, PRs and developers have shared their survival advice for the show, as well as sharing where is good to eat and drink, and what their predictions for the show are. And we …

Ad-blockers are costing jobs and seriously harming the games press, say leading media execs. Tech-savvy gamers are more prone to using ad-blockers than any other audience, says IGN, Videogamer and Eurogamer. These websites can pay to have their ads unblocked, as long as they only use ‘acceptable advertising’. But one …

New branch to provide support for more than 1,000 registered developers in Europe

Corey May picked up by Certain Affinity as narrative director

Is there a doping problem in eSports? That’s the prospect many of the sector’s leading companies are now facing up to following recent claims from one player about widespread drug use. Counter Strike player and former Cloud9 member Kory ‘Semphis’ Friesen caused a storm last week when he claimed that …

PC-style keyboard and mouse support appears to be on the way to Xbox One. The console can already work with USB keyboards, and now Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said that mouse support is also in the works. The confirmation came from a conversation on Twitter regarding the possibility of …