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

Former vice president Joachim Kempin has revealed that Microsoft got into the console business primarily to take on and defeat Sony – after Sony denied Microsoft’s interest in partnership. According to Kempin, Microsoft set about creating the Xbox hardware so that Sony didn’t achieve the kind of dominance on televisions …

Valve boss says user should be shop curator, not corporations

With The Witcher 3 reveal behind it, CD Projekt has announced lifetime sales numbers for the franchise. Between The Witcher and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, the series has surpassed 5m copies sold – with 2012’s Xbox 360 release of the sequel contributing significantly to the figure. The Witcher …

Believe the doom mongers and you’ll believe that games retail won’t exist in ten years time. We think it will, just in a radically different form. Traditional video games retail is dying. If you want the proof then simply look at the nightmare that has engulfed HMV and Blockbuster over …

Crowd-funded Android game console Ouya is set to hit US retail in June, carrying a price tag of $99.99. CEO Julie Uhrman has said that the console will first be made available to Kickstarter backers in March, followed by preorder customers, who will receive the console in April. The $99.99 …

The Wii U’s slow start on the market can be attributed to the difficulty of conveying its features to the public. That’s the opinion of Xavier Poix, the MD of Ubisoft’s Annecy, Montpellier, and Paris studios who also admitted that Ubisoft made mistakes with Wii U launch title ZombiU. "The …

Conifer Games takes on crowdfunding with $40,000 empire building game

EA has been named as the most critically successful publisher of 2012 by reviews aggregation site Metacritic. The report included all publishers who had released 15 or more titles and factored in metrics including average review score and the number of good (75%+), bad (49%-) and great (90%+) titles published. …

'We don't expect to see a meaningful change in what it costs us to release our products'

The PlayStation Vita has completed one year and PSN is celebrating by hosting a sale on several Vita titles. The sale offers up to 50% off on 24 titles for the handled, with an additional 10% discount to PlayStation Plus subscribers on most of them. The sale went live today …