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

Xbox World appears to be cleaning out its closet ahead of the magazine’s planned shutdown next month. The UK publication’s penultimate issue brings an 8-page feature claiming to expose Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox. For starters, the mag believes the upcoming console will again bear "Xbox" as its lone title and will …

Valve has revealed the top ten sellers on Steam for the week ahead of Black Friday’s promotions. Call of Duty: Black Ops II leapt to first, as its launch in the middle of the week no doubt boosted the title after making an impact a week earlier with pre-orders. Assassin’s …

PlayFirst’s Chris Williams has been hired by Big Fish to head its new push into the free-to-play market. Williams becomes the company’s VP and GM of free-to-play. The company says that it is set to transform its free-to-play initiative from an emerging business to a hyper-growth business” in 2013. It …

The respected film actor gets the rapid-fire question treatment

PC publisher Focus Multimedia believes it has one of the year’s biggest PC sellers on its hands in Angry Birds Star Wars. The firm released a boxed PC version of Rovio’s new game today and claims it will outsell anything else the format has to offer this Christmas. Collaborations of …

Latest Call of Duty beats Modern Warfare 3 first day sales by $100 million

The games business is a marathon, and Nick Gibson says Sony is not out of the running yet

Call of Duty: Black Ops II has sold an estimated $500m worth of units in tis first 24 hours. That beats the $400m made by last year’s Modern Warfare 3 in the same period. What hasn’t been revealed, though, is how many units the game sold. Modern Warfare 3 managed …

Former PlayFirst exec Chris Williams joins developer as GM of F2P

With just days to go before its November 20th release, Square Enix has released its final launch trailer for Hitman: Absolution. The short also reveals the first review scores for the game, which are hugely encouraging. X360 magazine scored it 10/10 describing the title as one of the best games …