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

Sony has revealed a fresh initiative that it hopes will encourage PSP owners to make the step up to PlayStation Vita when it is released in Japan in a month’s time. Andriasang has first word of the ‘UMD Passport’. Once downloaded it will allow gamers to purchase digital version of …

Technicians are working night and day to get the Call of Duty Elite network up and running for everyone, Activision has claimed. The service has struggled since the launch of Modern Warfare 3 earlier this week due to high demand. Activision is beefing up the available servers to alleviate the …

Valve has confirmed rumours circulating earlier this week that hackers have compromised the Steam network and, most worryingly, a database of information and personal data was compromised. A plundered Steam database, managed by games giant Valve, contains information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing …

Email and billing addresses, encrypted passwords and personal data has been breached

OnLive wants developers to ‘blow their minds’ and create content built specifically for cloud gaming. At London Games Conference today, OnLive CTO Tom Paquin used his experience at Netscape as an example. He said Netscape asked consumers what they wanted and that they all asked for news, sport and weather. …

By 2014 there will be over 600m connected devices able to play browser games in the US and Western Europe, says Nick Parker. These includePCs, tablets, TVs, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes. That’s on top of 225m smart phones,according to the Parker Consulting analyst, who was speaking at the 2011 …

LONDON GAMES CONFERENCE 2011: Influential games portal has 35 million users worldwide

By 2016 all forms of entertainment will be interactive, says Xbox Live’s Robin Burrowes. The Xbox Live product chief backed up his statement with stats from recent Xbox surveys, which showed that 42 per cent of people use social networks while watching a TV programme. He says: "All forms of …

At London Games Conference today, PopCap senior designer David Bishop listed ten ways to fail at mobile gaming. 1: Blank Android. "Don’t publish on Android. It is a complete waste of time," he said. "And absolutely don’t bother with Kindle Fire. Nobody will buy it." 2: Ignore Facebook.Nobody does anything …

Miniclip’s senior producer Jamie Cason says online browser games are nearing the level of quality associated with console titles. The online games portal spoke highly of its Dogfight Squadron game. Cason told attendees at the 2011 London Games Conference: These browser games – like Dogfight Squadron – are approaching console …