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

The cost of Amazon Prime membership is getting a significant increase. Having previously warned that such a move was in the offing, cost of Prime membership will on February 26th increase from 49 to 79. However, customers are going to be getting a big extra for the money – Prime …

Angry Birds creators Rovio says it is crucial that parents are made aware of the costs in free-to-play games. The firm’s comments come after an OFT investigation, which found that developers and platform holders must ensure users – particularly parents and children – are made aware of in-game costs. Rovio …

Console giant has 'deliberately taken its time to tweak and polish the headset before revealing it'

A game like Dark Souls has no right to be talked about in the same breath as Skyrim. An incredibly difficult Japanese RPG sounds as niche as it gets, yet Namco Bandai’s series has become a hit. The spiritual successor to PS3 favourite Demons Souls, Dark Souls launched in 2011 …

The Nintendo Pokemon X and Pokemon Y Battle Tournament 2014 has been officially announced. It kicks off on March 1st and takes place at a number of UK shopping centres – beginning in Birmingham’s Bullring and at GAME Brighton. The winners of both Expert (13 years and over) and Junior …

Codemasters's Daniel Oxford discusses the key skills needed for his role in art

Europe’s largest teaching laboratory with access to PlayStation development kits has been opened today at Abertay University in Dundee. Abertay’s has now permanently installed 30 new PlayStation Vita development kits, adding to its existing stock of PS3 and PS4 dev kits. And students have access to all of the hardware …

New toolset includes pre-built and customisable male, female and creature models

An Oculus Rift-rivalling virtual reality headset from Sony will be revealed next month. That’s according to TechRadar, which claims to have word from an inside source” that Sony will present the new hardware at GDC 2014 in San Francisco on March 17th. Said the source: "The quality and resolution are …

Phoenix Online Studios, most recently known for its episodic adventure series Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, is expanding into game publishing with the formation of Phoenix Online Publishing. Phoenix Online is co-founded by Vitek Goyel, who also heads PixelTek, a games development services company based in Mumbai. Phoenix Online Publishing …