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

12 staff let go as part of restructuring efforts at studio

Free-to-play specialist King has filed for an IPO as it plans to go public. It will list on the New York Stock Exchange as King Digital Entertainment using the ticker symbol ‘KING’. The filing also revealed that King’s 2013 revenues hit $1.88bn with net profit reaching $567.6m. That’s up a …

GAME and Sony have teamed up to offer 100 exclusive store lock-ins with upcoming release Thief. These differ from GAME’s regular lock-ins in that the events, which will take place on the day before the game’s release on Thursday February 27th, are only for the winners and their mates. Those …

Activision is to reduce the annualised focus of the Skylanders brand. The revised strategy will apply to the remaining figures in its Swap Force range, Activision’s Glenn Oliver has told Polygon, which will be released in small groups every few months or so”. There will also be more re-releases of …

Full-body tracking suit aims to allow players to interact naturally with game worlds

A gameplay video for Sony’s upcoming PS4 exclusive The Order: 1886 has appeared online, and you can see it below. The footage originally appeared on DailyMotion but has now made its way onto YouTube. Both files can be seen here. In addition, a number of screens have been posted on …

Sony’s latest home console has exceeded over 5.3m units

Game testing and localisation company Keywords Studios has acquired outsourcing services provider Babel Media. As part of the acquisition, Keywords has said it will settle current financial obligations of Babel and pay sellers to a total of 5.3m. Around 2.2m of the acquisition will be funded by the issue of …

Deal comes less than a year after Keywords went public on London AIM

The Atlus brand has been resurrected by new owner Sega Sammy. Atlus owner Index filed for bankruptcy in June of last year and was three months later acquired by Sega. Now Gematsu reports that the Index subsidiary will on April 1st be split into two companies – Atlus and Index. …