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

Activision has significantly strengthened its UK and Euro PR teams, with three new recruits. Craig O’Boyle joins as director for European public relations. He replaces Nick Grange, who left the firm for Apple in April. O’Boyle joined the publisher in August and has worked in PR for ten years, including …

Video games will get an accolade that wants to be our equivalent of the Turner, Mercury or Booker prize. While art, music and literature have their own annual prizes picking the best single creation of the year, games do not. So next month organisers of the October GameCity Festival in …

Koch Media’s publishing label Deep Silver scored its first ever No.1 this week with Dead Island. Its victory marks the end of an aggressive campaign by Koch, which started with a cinematic teaser in February. We’ve handled titles that hit No.1 in the UK, but never where we acted as …

HMV and GAME hope to get a slice of Olympic gold as they open new-look stores in Westfield’s 1.45bn Stratford shopping complex. Westfield says the centre – which opened at the Olympic village this week – has a catchment area of 4.1m residents, with a potential spend of 3.24bn between …

id Software recently had Tim Willits, creative director of RAGE, out in Sydney to host local media events. MCV Pacific spoke to Tim about RAGE, the future of games and more. Why has id decided to move away from the macabre corridor-crawling action games it has been known for? It …

New Zealand developer Sidhe’s mobile arm PikPok has announced the release of three new smartphone games this week. The three titles are Flick Kick Rugby Kickoff for iOS and Android, Own The Game (previously released for browsers) for iOS and Android and Monsters Ate My Condo for iOS. Flick Kick …

Starting Monday 15th September, Microsoft will be kicking off a Kinect tour at shopping centres throughout Australia. The tour will be showcasing upcoming Christmas Kinect releases including Kinect Disneyland Adventures and the Australian-developed Fruit Ninja. Andy Coughlin, retail lead at Microsoft Australia, said: "There will be some amazing new games …

Develop provides a breakdown of what to expect at trial

New triple-A group to create â??engaging and fulfilling online game experiencesâ??

Xenoblade Chronicles achieves 92 Metacritic rating