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

Valve’s Steam Summer Sale is officially underway, offering a variety of specials and discounts on the distributor’s vast PC games library for the next ten days. An announcement post on Steam’s News section states that more than a hundred products will be featured as Daily Deals. The sale also includes …

Ridge Racer’s foray into the world of free-to-play is coming to an end in the summer. Bandai Namco has confirmed that it will turn off the game’s servers by August 15th. The Bugbear-developed title had been widely criticised for its implementation of microtransactions. The leading developer and publisher wanted to …

The video games industry should follow in the footsteps of the music sector and rid itself of digital rights management (DRM). That’s according to GOG North America boss Guillaume Rambourg who told Eurogamer that DRM does nothing other than punish loyal gamers. "We totally believe that distributing games without DRM …

Nintendo has backtracked on previous plans to introduce dual-GamePad support for Wii U titles. The functionality was once promised for 2013 but is yet to be implemented in any of the console’s titles. That now doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon. "Certainly as we’ve been working on Wii U, …

Ubisoft has said that a patch for the troubled PC version of Watch Dogs will be released in the coming days”. The game has had a troubled start to life, with modders claiming to have unlocked some allegedly deliberately blocked features and a promised patch to fix the numerous performance …

The co-founder of The Fullbright Company and co-creator of its seminal title Gone Home has formed his own studio. The new outfit for Johnnemann Nordhagen – amusingly named Dim Bulb Games (as opposed to Fullbright, see?) – will be based in San Francisco and continue to develop independent games. Nordhagen …

Despite expanding on the successes it has enjoyed with the Kindle, Kindle Fire and potentially promising Fire TV, Amazon’s new Fire Phone has been criticised by some analysts. Aside from the device’s 3D Dynamic Perspective screen, which tracks a user’s head and alters the screen image to create a pseudo-3D …

CEO Andrew Day ponders the challenges of a dynamic but fragmented market

Don't expect many more first-party blockbusters on PlayStation's handheld

Only a few team slots left for the game industry five-a-side competition, sponsored by PlayStation