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

A World of Warcraft player spent an average of 21 hours per day playing the online game. The gamer was logged into social networking client Raptr while playing, which tracked their stats. Raptr found the user poured 149 hours into playing World of Warcraft during Cataclysm’s first week on sale, …

Reports suggest that a new Uncharted game is in development for the PSP2. US games publication Game Informer claims it has been told that a spin-off of the popular PS3 adventure series is due for release on Sony’s next handheld by Christmas 2011, according to CVG. The developers we talked …

Crystal Dynamics has announced that a Tomb Raider PS3 trilogy pack will be released in Q1 2011. The release will include Tomb Raider Legend, Tomb Raider Anniversary and Tomb Raider Underworld on one Blu-ray disc. A retail listing appeared on Amazon Germany before developer Crystal Dynamics confirmed its authenticity. Global …

Monster Hunter Portable 3rd has become Capcom’s fastest-selling game of all time. The PSP RPG has shipped 3m copies in Japan in 17 days, bringing worldwide sales of the series up to 16m. Sales of the PSP quadrupled following the game’s release. Monster Hunter has also helped set a new …

EA CEO John Riccitiello has launched his most scathing attack on the Call of Duty franchise yet, criticising both developer Treyarch and Activision’s leading executives. "I don’t know that having two guys that probably don’t play the games, in the form of the CEO of Vivendi and the CEO of …

Software upgrade â??inboundâ??; data flow could be quadrupled

As was predicted by pretty much everybody last week, Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops has been named as the UK’s official Christmas Number One video game. The game has now sold over 3m copies in the UK, making it one of only three games to top the 100m mark …

Black Ops sold two million copies in its first four days, in comparison with Take That’s latest album which sold 520,000 copies in its first week (itself being the biggest first week album sales of the century). Games are developing at such an incredible pace and it’s evident to everyone …

The UK MD of publisher Sega has downplayed fears expressed by retail last month concerning the rising power of Valve’s digital distribution network Steam. Let me narrow down some publicly available market figures for you,” John Clark told MCV in an exclusive interview. In 2009, nearly 75m boxes were sold …

Reports suggest that Microsoft is working on a downloadable update for its motion camera Kinect that would effectively quadruple its level of accuracy. Eurogamer reports that the platform holder hopes to make it so accurate that it will be able to detect finger movement and hand rotation. How can this …