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

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was the New Year No.1 in the latest GfK Chart-Track Top 40. The game was also the Christmas No.1, and secures its fifth time at the top of the charts with a 20 per cent improvement in sales. Activision’s FPS has reportedly suffered a weaker-than-usual …

Boyd Multerer announces departure after 20 years

Nick Gibson takes a closer look at the growing European mobile and browser developer

Halo 5: Guardians my not be coming out until the end of the year, but we already know what we can expect in terms of limited editions. Pre-orders have kicked off in the US and gamers can either pick the Standard Edition for $59.99 (About 39, but expect it to …

PlayStation owners are being compensated for the downtime suffered by PSN over Christmas. The PSN was brought down by a group (called Lizard Squad) who apparently wanted to show Sony and Microsoft how easy it is to bring down their networks. But they only really succeeded in angering gamers and …

Sony Online Entertainment has announced the Planetside 2 beta is now expected out by the middle of this month on PlayStation 4, confirming the early release will miss its previously scheduled 2014 target window. GameSpot reports on the delay and newly-specified release target of mid-January 2015 for Planetside 2’s PS4 …

Xbox Live manager and XNA framework developer Boyd Multerer has announced his exit from Microsoft. Gamasutra reports on Multerer’s departure, which comes following 20 years of work with the company. He initially started as a contractor with Microsoft and was later brought on as a full-time software developer. The industry …

Steam users came out in droves during the holiday break, with Valve’s digital distribution service scoring a new record in total concurrent users over the past weekend. Blue’s News reports Steam’s game and player stats page showed users peaking out at 8,357,541 on Sunday, December 28th at one point. DOTA …

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has emerged the victor in Steam’s best sellers chart for the last full week of 2014, beating out Far Cry 4 for the top spot during the digital distributor’s ongoing end of the year sale. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Skyrim and South Park: The Stick of Truth …

Sales of video game software in the UK increased by 7.5 per cent to 2.5bn last year, says the Entertainment Retailer’s Association. As predicted, sales of physical (boxed) video games dropped year-on-year but only ever so slightly. Sales decreased 6.6 per cent to 948.5m. It’s a little disappointing, but not …