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

PlayStation Home’s virtual world Aurora has been visited 1m times within its first six weeks online. The floating world – which allows users of PS3’s online Home service to play games and win avatar rewards – launched in March. It’s the work of publisher nDreams. During launch, a competition called …

Valve has become the latest games firm to show interest in Nintendo’s newest console. Speaking to Joystiq, at the Games for Change Festival, the company’s head and co-founded Gabe Newell said that the Wii U fits into Valve’s scalability model”. Wii U seems to be a lot more powerful than …

Epic Games’ iOS blockbuster Infinity Blade will launch in Japan as a free-to-play game, a leading Japanese games company has said. Tokyo-based smartphone games giant Dena has won a contract to be the exclusive vendor of Infinity Blade in Japan, the company said. It will launch ‘Infinity Blade X’ as …

One leading tech site claims to have it on good authority that EA is on the verge of one of the largest acquisitions ever seen in the games industry. If true, TechCrunch‘s claims that EA is the mystery bidder behind a supposed $1bn swoop for PopCap would dwarf the $17m …

Valve’s recent release and critical hit Portal 2 has now sold in excess of 3m copies. The number comes from Gabe Newell himself and was revealed at the Games for Change event at New York yesterday, according to Joystiq. It’s understood that it covers both boxed retail and digital sales …

Having very much taken the back seat to PSP in the weeks that have followed its debut in Japan, Nintendo 3DS is finally back at the top of Media Create’s Japanese hardware charts. The machine sold almost 41k units last week, significantly up on the 25k sold the week before. …

Publishing giant 'to spend over $1 billion'

The Metropolitan Police has charged a hacker it arrested earlier this week with five offences under the Criminal Law Act and Computer Misuse Act. As previously reported by MCV, the 19 year-old Essex teenager in question is indeed Ryan Cleary. He is accused of constructing and distributing bots designed to …

We profile People Can Fly, Crytek, Ninja Theory, Evolution Studios, Guerrilla Games, Playdead and The Creative Assembly

Rumours suggest big-money swoop could be made by Zynga, EA or DeNA