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

Microsoft has announced the release of 43 apps for Xbox 360 spread across various regions between now and spring 2013. The new apps for the UK Xbox Live Marketplace are Sainsbury’s, streaming music service Napster, CrunchyRoll, All3M, Fightbox, GameTrailers, IndieFlix and Livesport.tv. Also available is Microsoft’s new pay-as-you-play Karaoke app. …

Independent Danish developer Full Control has won the Space Hulk video games licence from Games Workshop. Full Control is based in Copenhagen and specialises in Unity-built strategy games for PC and mobile. Based in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the new title is described as a 3D digital turn based strategy …

Nintendo’s Wii U hasn’t even been out for two weeks in the UK and hackers are already enjoying early success in cracking the console. A renowned hacking site reports that the Wii’s Homebrew Channel is already up and running on Wii U. It doesn’t run in the Wii U’s UI …

Unconfirmed reports suggest that the Wii U sold 307,471 units in its first week on sale in Japan. That’s 70,000 fewer units than the Wii sold in its debut week. It’s also nearly 15,000 fewer than PlayStation Vita sold in its first week. The number comes from French games site …

Grammy-nominated Austin Wintory to score Kickstarter-funded title

Current tech not up to scratch, but Newell hopeful as hardware improves

Mafia creator's new studio using CryEngine 3 for future console title

The sequel to soul-crushingly hard RPG Dark Souls was announced at the Video Game Awards. Dark Souls 2 will be developed by From Software and publisher Namco Bandai has promised that it will offer fans exactly the kind of demanding challenges and never-ending struggle that became the hallmark of this …

A mysterious trailer for The Phantom Pain at the Video Game Awards has raised lots of questions, but given few answers. Firstly, the central character in the trailer, whose face is never properly revealed, bears a striking resemblance to Metal Gear Solid hero Solid Snake, and the character is also …

At the recent Video Game Awards, Naughty Dog showed of a new trailer for The Last of Us, which ended with a long-awaited announcement of the game’s release date. The new trailer showed new characters, environments and gameplay elements such as horse-back riding, and teased a few plot details as …