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

UK retailers are rallying against reported plans to prevent pre-owned sales on the next Xbox. Website VGLeaks reported last week that Microsoft’s next console will require a permanent online connection and will not need to read optical discs once a game has been installed. The report adds weight to persistent …

A report claiming to reveal the systems that Metacritic uses to assign importance” to reviews from various sites has been dismissed by the reviews aggregator. Gamasutra has reported that websites whose reviews are included in Metacritic’s roundup were split into six different categories, with those in higher tiers having a …

Mark Nicholas, David Lloyd and Michael Slater will provide commentary for Ashes Cricket 2013, publisher 505 Games has announced. Nicholas, who serves as a television presenter n both the UK and Australia, will be the lead commentator, with Ex-England coach Lloyd and former Aussie opening batsman Slater providing expert inputs. …

PC tech giant AMD has revealed that it was the upcoming Radeon HD 7990 that powered EA’s technically impressive Battlefield 4 demo at GDC. Until now AMD has rarely spoken about the HD 7990 specifically. As expected, the card is basically two high-end HD 7970s spliced together on a single …

The global PC gaming software market ballooned to $20bn last year, according to a new report by industry research group DFC Intelligence. The report (via Shacknews) was commissioned by the PC Gaming Alliance, which also announced the results. The organization includes both AMD and Intel. The $20bn figure marks an …

The Xbox 360 edition of Minecraft has reached yet another milestone. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition has now sold over SIX MILLION copies,” console developer 4J Studios announced on Twitter. The game’s continuing success on Microsoft’s console is no surprise, with indie retailer Game On recently telling MCV that the port …

Upcoming Android console Ouya will be available to buy from GAME. The retailer has opened pre-orders for the console, which will cost 99.99 when it arrives in June. Additional controllers are available for 39.99 each. It is presumed that GAME will also offer customers a chance to either buy games …

Calling Battlefield 3’s single-player campaign a fail”, DICE is aiming to infuse the true Battlefield experience into the campaign for Battlefield 4. We still have a lot of people who liked the campaign in Battlefield 3, but there were a lot of people who were like, this is not Battlefield. …

EA Labels boss says concept was led by devs, but admits it could have been communicated better

Konami has released a five-minute trailer for the freshly announced Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The game, which had been previously announced under two separate guises in the form of MGS: Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, is due out on PS3 and Xbox 360 later this year. …