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

Another intriguing piece of news to come out of today’s fiscal report from EA is its interest in spending on next-gen development over the next year. The company is putting up $80m for development of ‘Gen4 console systems’ games during their fiscal 2013. The publishing giant’s investment could indicate next-generation …

Along with many other tidbits in today’s EA Q4 report are some new figures regarding the publisher’s digital distribution service Origin. The service currently carries 11m registered members and has generated $150m in revenue (non-GAAP) during the fiscal year from March 31st, 2011 to April 1st, 2012. Additionally, EA’s cross-platform …

EA has revealed Mass Effect 3 has brought in over $200m in sales at retail. The company shared the figure as part of their Q4 earnings announcement earlier today. EA didn’t provide digital sales figures, and units sold for both retail and digital were also nowhere to be found in …

New entries to the Dead Space and Need for Speed franchises are set to arrive sometime in the current fiscal year, EA confirmed during a financial call earlier today. The games are to launch sometime prior to March 31st, 2013 (the end of fiscal 2013). More specifically, the Need for …

The active player base for Star Wars: The Old Republic has dropped from 1.7m to 1.3m, EA revealed today in an earnings statement. The 400,000 figure marks a subscriber decline of nearly 25% for the MMO since numbers were last shared in February. EA explained in a conference call earlier …

EA has revealed its financial results for Q4 of fiscal 2012, as well as fiscal 2012 as a whole. EA’s total net revenue hit $1.36bn during Q4, a 24 per cent increase over the $1.09bn reported at the end of this same period in fiscal 2011. Net revenue of packaged …

Edmund McMillen speaks out against 'manipulative money making tactics'

Codemasters’ decision to abandon the shooter genre was made last September. Bodycount – the firm’s bold attempt at an FPS – had failed. And the game’s Guildford studio was shut. Its racing studios are all that remain. And last month the publisher made it official. The days of Operation Flashpoint …

Sony expects its upcoming Move game Sorcery to be a flagship product for the motion accessory. The company says it raises the bar” for Move games, and has kicked off an ad campaign to get it in front of kids this summer. TV advertising will run around Cartoon Network programmes …

Pay attention. One of the most popular online ‘teen hangouts’ says digital games need to fight harder to battle brief attention spans. The man in charge of Habbo says that the migration of games to the web is inevitable, but makes fighting for consumers’ time more difficult. 10 years ago, …