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

Nintendo has revealed that 3DS games aimed at adult or mature markets will have slightly different packaging to other titles in Japan. The first game to carry the change will be Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell 3D, the spine of which will be black. Most DS games have a white spine on …

Develop Harmonix has called time on the Wii arm of the Rock Band Network. From tomorrow, no new content will be released on the service. RBN allowed users to create their own tracks for use in the game. Harmonix had until now been manually converting tracks uploaded by Xbox 360 …

Crunch controversy has made its inevitable return, but what can we learn from it?

'People at Kaos do not want to hear THQ publicly glorify crunch time'

Special report: THQ addresses dev tensions as worker says schedule has pushed team to the limit

Read the full letter sent to Develop by Kaos general manager David Votypka

Online retailer The Hut Group has seen its sales spike 70 per cent. Sales are up from 51m in 2009 to 87m in 2010. More than 80 per cent of these sales were generated by the Group’s own websites, including Zavvi.com and Thehut.com. The rest was generated through services to …

Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops has returned to the top of the UKIE GfK Chart-Track All Formats Top 40. EA’s FIFA 11, which sits in second place this week, had pipped the shooter to the top spot in the last two weeks. In fact, it had looked as if …

UK TV star and Twitter powerhouse Jonathan Ross has been doing his part in building the hype for Nintendo’s 3DS by discussing the device on the micro-blogging service. Ross, who has 825k+ followers on Twitter, revealed that he has "been invited by Nintendo to host a conference next week that …

Economic weakness, a change to the traditional hardware cycle, the growth of digital – there are plenty of things we can point the finger at when trying to assess the declines seen in all of the major games markets last year. But Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has footed responsibility …