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

RPG fans still have a while to wait for the return of Blizzard’s hugely popular Diablo series. The publisher’s CEO Mike Morhaime announced that Diablo III will be released in the second quarter of 2012 – anywhere between April and June. The new release window was given during an investor …

January was a grim month for UK games retail, with sales down 30 per cent year-on-year. There was a dearth of new releases last month – by comparison LittleBigPlanet 2 and Dead Space 2 were released in January 2011. In total 2,781,786 games were sold last month, down 27.7 per …

David Yarnton confirmed this week that his overseeing of Nintendo’s UK marketing will be short-term. Current marketing director Dawn Paine leaves Nintendo after ten years to join Universal Pictures later this month, with Yarnton taking an overseeing role until an appointment is made. But he told MCV that a successor …

A new partnership between UK publisher Lace Mamba Global and Koch Media will allow the former to bring its titles to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Koch has secured exclusive distribution rights to Lace Mamba’s titles in these markets for the next three years. The first wave of titles will include …

MCV Pacific has brought in more editorial resource in the form of James Cullinane, having enjoyed a hugely successful launch in the Asia-Pacific region. James has been a writer at GamePlanet for some time now, this being his first foray into games after spending extensive time in advertising and marketing. …

We examine the astonishing growth of Tim Schafer's kickstarter

The NPD Group estimates that downloadable, social, mobile and other form of non-physical games took up to $400m in sales last month. The research firm’s data shows that hardware and boxed sales were down 34 per cent year-on-year in January – coincidentally also around the $400m mark. NPD analyst Liam …

Microsoft and Activision had the best performing products in the US last month. Xbox 360 was the top selling hardware for a sixth consecutive month, while Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 topped the best-selling games chart. However, the Top 10 games did not sell well enough to prevent sales …

A lack of new releases and the comparatively strong sales in 2011 saw the US video games market drop by almost $400m last month. NDP data shows that combined sales of hardware, software and accessories fell to $750.6m, down 34 per cent from the $1.14bn taken in January. Both software …

Skylanders is Activision’s biggest ever ‘new IP’ and ‘potentially a $1bn franchise.’ The new kids property – which is technically part of the Spyro franchise, but we’ll gloss over that – was 2011’s No.1 kids property, according to the publisher. It says that the toys alone has sold more than …