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

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.

Studios not told of any such update since the PSN hack, Sony source says

Digital games are changing the merchandising business by bridging the gap between physical and virtual goods. For example, most Moshi Monsters toys are accompanied by a promotional code that offers users a virtual gift to use online. Level Up Wear – a firm that produces clothing based on official game …

Forget about the business of games for a moment and try to put yourself in the mind of a ten-year-old boy or girl. To them, a game brand they admire such as Moshi Monsters, Pokmon or Sonic the Hedgehog is probably not seen as just a video game – nor …