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

Square Enix has lifted the lid on a massively multiplayer online version of its Championship Manager football franchise. Called Championship Manager: World of Football, the game will of course be free-to-play and will be accessible from any standard web browser. It is being developed by both series stalwart Beautiful Game …

Publisher Square Enix has announced that console RPG sequel Final Fantasy XIII-2 will be released in North America in January 2012. It has already been pencilled in for a December 2011 release in Japan on Ps3 and Xbox 360. There’s no concrete European release date as of yet, but that’s …

Attendees at the Develop Awards this week will be invited to donate towards industry charity GamesAid. A special envelope will be placed on each table at the sell-out event, with guests on the night encouraged to put just 10 each inside. You can alsodonate now onlineto help the games industry’s …

EA Sports has announced it will open a new studio in Austin, Texas that will create around 300 jobs. The studio joins EA Sports’ existing offices in Tiburon, Florida and Burnaby, British Columbia. It’s part of the publisher’s plans to expand its sports game label. "It’s an exciting time for …

Develop Conference: Supercell CEO predicts multi-platform convergence in browsers 'within a year'

The former commercial and marketing director of Blockbuster Italia has been named as the country manager of Koch Media Italy as the company prepares for life from its new Milan office. Another new face, Antonio Marcella, will take charge of sales at the division. He joins from THQ where he …

Develop Conference: Simon Oliver explains why his studio went from iOS to console

'Bring a tenner' campaign comes to Brighton awards night

The global games market is getting pretty close to a 50/50 split between digital and physical revenue, according to a senior EA Sports exec. EA Sports worldwide studio boss Andrew Wilson told attendees at the opening day of the Brighton Develop conference that the firm’s research says last year digital …

Games retailers face serious challenges from the disruption created by on-demand content according to EA Sports boss Andrew Wilson. Speaking this morning in a keynote speech at the Develop conference, he said that despite market growth which meant more gamers than ever were out there, fewer and fewer are going …