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

A former US Army Special Operations Command paratrooper and Afghanistan veteran has spoken out in criticism of Activision’s leading Modern Warfare 3 Christmas ad. [The ad] is so base and strident that it’s hard to believe that it’s not deliberately offensive,” D B Grady wrote on The Atlantic. The game …

FIFA 12 has topped the UK games retail charts for the second week in a row ahead of Modern Warfare 3. The football game claimed the last No.1 of 2011 for the week ending December 31st, despite a week-on-week drop in sales of 27 per cent. It’s the second year …

Longstanding Cambridge-based UK studio becomes latest member of UK trade body

Top Wii games more pirated than Xbox 360's, research suggests

Black Powder Media, the producer of iOS title Vector Tanks 3, has claimed that Atari has issued a number of copyright infringement claims against games that resemble anything from Atari’s back catalogue. Vector Tanks 3 is in itself a derivative of Atari’s 1980 arcade title Battlezone. Thanks to their special …

Knighthood to Apple device designer Jonathan Ive

Not only are hopes of Shenmue 3 still dead in the balance, but now the newest Shenmue title to hit the market has been scrapped. Launched in December 2010 in Japan, Ysnet’s Shenmue World was a social game for mobile phones. However, Andriasang reports that Ysnet announced its surprise closure …

But Entertainment Software Association still backs the bill

The PC version of EA and Cryek’s Crysis 2 was the most pirated game of 2011, according to TorrentFreak. Between its release in March 2011 and the end of the year, the shooter was downloaded approximately 3,920,000 times. This ranked it ahead of other PC titles such as Modern Warfare …

Three of gaming’s biggest companies have withdrawn support for America’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). EA, Nintendo and Sony had all previously backed the movement but their names have since disappeared from the official list of corporate supporters. The move comes as hacker group Anonymous released a video threatening to …