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

The body that looks after PEGI says it was right to stop the dual-rating of products. Publishers were recently aggrieved to discover they could no longer brand games with both PEGI and German USK ratings. Instead, they must now incur extra costs making packaging for just Germany, which can only …

Publisher Sega is seeing its investment into the digital space pay off. The firm’s MCV Award-winning PC download team says senior management have ramped up their digital resource, which has helped the firm crack new territories. A few years ago the digital team was bolted on to the side of …

Games media giant IGN is on the hunt for new writers as it expands its UK editorial coverage. The firm is looking for a new entertainment writer and games editor that will help IGN reach wider audiences through more than just the website. We’re looking for well-known writers who want …

The ongoing PSN saga has taken a dramatic turn for the worse with evidence that hackers responsible for the PSN breach last week are attempting to sell users’ credit card details online. It’s believed that hackers have obtained unencrypted databases including names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, email passwords, date of …

It may have been one of the hottest Easters on record, but UK games retailers enjoyed a red hot weekend of sales last week. Some 22.4 million was made over the course of the Easter week, marking an increase of 43 per cent over the 15.8m generated a week before. …

Electronic Arts’ Q1 line-up looked suspiciously like most other publishers’ Q4 line-up: Dead Space 2, Bulletstorm, Fight Night Champion, Mass Effect 2 on PlayStation 3, Dragon Age II, Crysis 2, The Sims Medieval, Shift 2: Unleashed and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters. That’s eight top ten hits, including …

Electronic Arts may be focusing more and more resources on fewer and fewer super-brands, but it insists it is equally committed to creating new franchises and working with pioneering studios. In the last few years, the publisher has reacted to changing market conditions by dramatically reducing its output. In FY09 …

Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division – which amongst other things is home to the company’s Xbox operations – has enjoyed a surge in revenue and profit in the first quarter of 2011. EDD posted revenues of $1.94bn, a rise of 60 per cent compared to calendar Q1 2010. Profits climbed …

Just three weeks ago in this very magazine Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot predicted his firm could eventually topple EA and Activision as the leading third-party publisher. These were not just hysterical words from a Frenchman feeding off the excitement of receiving our Grand Prix award. (Although he did tell us …

Casual Collective, the acclaimed independent game developer, is now Kixeye.