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

Future games from publisher Ubisoft will showcase a greater diversity of lead characters, the company’s CEO has pledged. "We are working on that," Yves Guillemot told CVG. "We want to spend more time on the worlds and characters in our games. You will see more and more of this at …

Time is running out if you want to challenge the likes of Sports Interactive, Twitch, Ubisoft, Rockstar Games, GreenManGaming, and 2K Games at next week’s MCV Games 5s. Most of the team spaces for next month’s games industry five-a-side competition are spoken for but there are a few slots left. …

Comic giant IDW, Crayola, Immediate Media and General Mills have all signed up or extended their deals as licensing partners for Activision’s Skylanders property. IDW’s official comic book series will serve as a prequel to Skylanders Trap Team, with issue #0 featuring a 16-page introductory story to the universe. Immediate …

Chairman and CFO Simon Elms tells us how specialist services differ from simple outsourcing

The monetization rules that govern Minecraft servers have led to a public spat between the game’s creator and his community. It’s also led to some public bickering with the press. Mojang recently confirmed its intention to enforce details in its end user licence agreement (EULA) for Minecraft that while permitting …

The PlayStation Vita has crept ahead of Wii U in Japan as the momentum gained from the release of Mario Kart 8 has started to wear off. The latest Famitsu data shows that Nintendo’s machine sold 10,366 units in the week ending June 15th. That’s down from 12,576 units last …

And you thought E3 was no longer relevant? Twitch has revealed that E3 2014 set a new sitewide viewership record for the service with 5.9m unique daily viewers logging on to watch the event. At its peak 405,029 people were watching Twitch’s E3 livestream on day one. Over the course …

The quality of Rockstar’s next-gen Grand Theft Auto V teaser has once again saddened Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima. That’s because, as he previously confessed, he thinks the game is so good it makes others – including his own – look bad. "What Rockstar has created and the world …

New study claims representation of females in UK IT industry is in decline

Both Nintendo’s Wii U and Sony’s PlayStation Vita boasted impressive sales gains in the US last month. Grabbing the headlines has been Wii U, which sold 60k units in the US in May – that’s 85 per cent up on the previous month and 90 per cent up on May …