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

Adult-themed games look set to finally get an official route into the Australian market. After three years of deliberation, Australia’s Federal Parliament has finally passed legislation that will allow video games to be classified as R18+. Currently the maximum rating available is MA15+, meaning games with content not suitable for …

EA is running a special promotion for Origin users in India, whereby preordering one of its upcoming games entitles you to purchase a second game for just Rs 100. The offer is valid on all preorders, but the second game priced at Rs 100 must be from a limited selection, …

Sony UK has been overwhelmed by the retail feedback to Wonderbook. Amazon told MCV that the interactive book service – which will launch with Harry Potter spin-off Book of Spells – is ‘terrific’. SCE UK’s boss Fergal Gara said that Wonderbook is the big PS3 launch of Christmas, and will …

PS Vita got short shrift during Sony’s E3 presentation, but don’t mistake that for a lack of energy behind the new handheld. According to Sony, the firm focused on just three big brands heading to Vita – Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty and YouTube – to prove the device’s star …

The NASSCOM Gaming Forum is heading to Hyderabad on 7th July for its second developers’ meet. On the agenda is a talk on publishing games on Steam by Vinnie Reddy, CEO of BlueGiant Interactive. The Hyderabad-based studio is currently working on its new PC strategy title – Tryst, and self-published …

Another supposed leak from Microsoft suggests that an Xbox tablet, called ‘Xbox Surface’, is very much in the works. A detailed 56-page document claiming to detail the next generation of Xbox (codenamed Xbox 720) was revealed to the world yesterday. This was shortly followed by claims of a new Microsoft …

Missed the print issue? Our Q&A with the development luminary is in our digital edition, along with a wealth of other content

A year after EA first unleashed its digital download service Origin, the company’s senior VP of global e-commerce David DeMartini has christened its first 12 months as a huge success”. When you consider where we started from, which we kind of say was a standing start, we’ve got 12m downloads …

GamesWISE to offer business advice to investors and developers

Ian Shepherd has said that UK retailers are routinely failing to correctly manage their customers. I’ll go out on a limb and assert that there is no retailer in the UK properly managing its customer base, including the ones I’ve worked in,” he wrote on his blog Moving Tribes. That’s …