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

CityVille has reaffirmed itself as the most popular Facebook game ever by attracting over 100m users. The casual title developed by Zynga now has 100,064,578 monthly active users, putting it ahead of the firm’s other big Facebook offering FarmVille. This has 57m monthly users. CityVille launched on December 2nd and …

Up-and-coming Israeli firm PrimeSense has received $50 milling in funding. The company created some of the technology behind Kinect, as well as other devices that scan users and react to their gestures. The funding came from US private equity firm Silver Lake, as well as PrimeSense’s existing investors: venture capital …

Microsoft’s community voice Larry ‘Major Nelson’ Hyrb has claimed that the platform holder had such a successful Christmas in America that it actually ran our of hardware by the end of the period. "I found out we ran out of consoles at end of the month so [we] don’t expect …

Indie smash Minecraft has passed its millionth customer landmark, its creator has revealed. The PC title – released as an ‘Alpha edition’ in June last year – has brought fame and fortune to its creator Markus Persson. "Minecraft just passed one million copies sold," Perrson confirmed via his Twitter account. …

Offices evacuated as Queensland faces deadliest flood in 50 years

Following confirmation earlier this week that eight games will launch alongside the 3DS in Japan on February 26th, Nintendo has now dated a further 16 games that will be out in the month that follows. As reported by Andriasang, seven games have been given definitive release dates: March 11th: Super …

Argos has posted a 4.9 per cent like-for-like drop in sales to 1,861m from August 29th, 2010 to January 1, 2011. The catalogue retailer’s parent Home Retail Group again cited video games as the most challenging category, echoing its financial statement made last September. A statement read: In difficult markets, …

Gaming charity SpecialEffect needs your games. The organisation is calling out to publishers and platform holders alike for their support, requesting that it be added to any promotional mail-out lists. This will aid SpecialEffect’s ongoing effects to vet as many games as possible. The charity can then advise people with …

505 will release Grease for PS3 Move and Xbox 360 Kinect later this year – but it will be a very different game to the one that hit Wii and DS last year. The firm admits that the market shifted significantly during the development of the first version – and …

Triple-A RPG sequel Mass Effect 2 is to break with traditional retail models by releasing both at retail and online simultaneously next week. Speaking on the US PlayStation blog, BioWare’s community coordinator Chris Priestly confirmed that the game will be available to download on PSN on the same day boxed …