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

An interesting new agreement between streaming games specialist OnLive and giant consumer games network GameSpot has been announced. It will see the streaming service position playable demos of games within the pages of GameSpot’s reviews. The result is that consumers will be able to try a fully-featured version of the …

Mark Fludder from the Information Industries Bureau in Queensland, talked to MCV recently about the aftermath of the state’s high profile dev closures. Auran (Trainz, Fury and Dark Reign) and Pandemic (The Saboteur) both closed their doors in the last few years, with Krome Studios remaining in existence but shedding …

According to The Australian’s coverage of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Outlook 2011 report, gaming in Australia is set to have compound growth of 9.5% by 2015. The report, which was released today, cited interactive games and pay-TV as the two highpoints driving growth in the Australian media sector, while print magazines and …

Dinoroar Interactive, a Sydney-based developer, has announced Samurai Training, its iOS release from June, is now available for Android. Dinoroar has previously released Memory Loss, a brain training game for iOS, and is pursuing a similar concept for reflexes with Samurai Training, and is looking to release a visual training …

Today’s issue of UK national newspaper The Sun leads with a story that has no doubt caused headaches at Microsoft. With a headline of ‘Death by Xbox’, the paper has pushed to the fore the tragic case of Chris Staniforth, a 20-year-old who died of deep-vein-thrombosis (DVT). The report directly …

Media Molecule has announced that two collections of Toy Story-themed content will be released for LittleBigPlanet 2 next week. The Toy Story level kit features nine new levels based on the popular Pixar films, two new music tracks and one interactive music track. For level builders, there is a new …

Famed 2D shooter studio Cave is to build games for Windows Phone 7, the studio has announced. The Tokyo-based Dodonpachi developer has already embraced the smartphone platforms by porting several champion games to Apple’s iOS platform. Now, according to a report translated byAndriasang, the longstanding studio is building content for …

Well, it finally happened. Steve Jobs’ consumer electronic empire Apple now has more money to play with than the US treasury – the world’s biggest economy and lynchpin of the Western financial system. According to US Treasury figures released this week, the United States has an operating cash balance of …

Retailer GAME is returning to its Play&Trade offer that allows gamers to buy one of a selection of titles and trade it back at a guaranteed rate. The net result is that each game will, in the long run, only cost 5, with the remaining value returned in the fork …

Dodonpachi studio building original title for Microsoft handheld