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

A petition urging EA to reinstate toddlers and swimming pools into The Sims 4 has passed 16,000 signatures. Toddlers have been a vital aspect to The Sims series because it is a lifestate that is crucial to the flow of the game,” it reads. Without it, newborns will age straight …

Retailer GameStop wans to increase the amount of exclusive content it can offer customers who use it to pre-order games. VentureBeat reports that to do this it has embarked on a strategy of buddying up with publishers and developers – ideally early on in the development process. GamesStop indicated that …

All hope of a Vita version of BioShock appears to be over. 2K and Sony couldn’t put a deal together when I last checked,” BioShock creator Ken Levine said on Twitter. They seemed way more optimistic about this back in 2011. Wish I could do it myself, but lawyers and …

Modern games consumers are comfortable with the amount of additional digital content and extras that accompany modern games. That’s according to Ubisoft’s VP of digital publishing Chris Early, who told Games Industry that there was no resistance” to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag’s ‘Time Saver’ DLC that allowed players to …

Divinity: Original Sin has claimed the top spot on Steam during last week’s sales period, which included the fading days of the digital distributor’s summer sale. Wolfenstein: The New Order and Payday 2 finished with their own flourishes, thanks to significant promotional discounts. The pair finished in the runner-up and …

Fighting franchise BlazBlue is heading to iPhones and iPads later this year in the form of a card game, Aksys Games has announced. Siliconera reports the publisher unveiled BlazBlue: Battle Cards for iOS during a presentation this past weekend at Anime Expo 2014 in Los Angeles, California. The game features …

Oculus VR has made a pair of announcements today, as the company has both acquired RakNet and revealed its own Oculus Connect conference for September. A post on the Oculus blog explains that RakNet – a C++ networking middleware system for game development – will provide Oculus Rift developers the …

The inclusion of microtransactions in PES 2015’s Master League mode is nothing other than a time saving exercise for those with some spare cash. That’s according to Konami, which has said that non-paying players will still be able to access the same content providing they’re happy to put in the …

VR firm open sources technology

Google has confirmed plans to add native virtual reality support to its Chrome web browser. Following the news last week that Mozilla is planning on doing the same for Firefox, Google has already has released builds for Chrome that offer functioning Oculus Rift support. Compatibility with Google’s own Google Cardboard …