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

Former Battlefield boss joins Paradox Interactive

John Burns has been appointed as SVP and general manager of Trion Worlds Europe. The online games outfit welcomes the former EA and Atari man to its exec team – he has been consulting for the firm since the start of 2011. He reports to publishing SVP David Reid. Trion …

Some 45,000 execs from over 200 companies and 80 countries will be attending E3 this year. That’s comfortably close – but not too close – to the big show’s pre-collapse boom, according to ESA’s VP of industry affairs Rich Taylor. That seems to be the size and scope of show …

Shots have been fired in the war between the two biggest FPS brands. In interviews with MCV, Activision has shrugged off EA’s Battlefield 3 as a credible threat to Modern Warfare 3 – while EA insists this is the perfect year to gain back market share” from Call of Duty. The …

Publisher Nordic Games has revealed four new entries in its Wii karaoke series. We Sing Pop, We Sing Rock, We Sing UK Hits and We Sing America are expected to arrive later this year. The latter will be exclusive to the US while We Sing Rock will be exclusive to …

This year’s Develop Industry Excellence Awards have been bolstered by new partner Eurogamer. Over 500 leading games development professionals will be attending the awards event, which runs on Wednesday July 20th during the Develop Conference in Brighton. There are 95 companies competing across 21 categories, including New Download IP, Best …

Ooutside of the BFG that Call of Duty represents, Activision actually has a relatively slimmer slate of tentpole titles than in recent years. But that’s just a reflection of the market, says Activision publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg. There is a pattern on the market; a concentration of passionate energy around …

Three minutes. That’s how long it takes Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg to mutter the C-word. And we don’t mean ‘Call of Duty’, the eighth instalment of which – Modern Warfare 3 – was finally officially unveiled last week. We mean ‘competition’. Because, as Hirshberg himself says, When you are …

One of the more intriguing statements from CEO John Riccitiello during EA’s FY11 analysts call was that the publisher is going to ‘become a platform’. Now, we live in what buzzword aficionados like to call ‘disruptive’ times, and many previously rock solid industry terms are evolving. But, for EA to …

It’s looking increasingly likely that PlayStation Vita is to be the official name of Sony’s PlayStation Portable successor. As reported by Eurogamer, a brief look at the net code behind Sony’s E3 website includes several references to the Vita brand as well as directories named ‘games’, ‘media’ and ‘features’. The …