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

PopCap’s Zuma Blitz has now gone live on Facebook, reworking the games firm’s hit puzzle game for a social platform. The game condenses the familiar ball-blasting mechanic into a one-minute quickfire game and introduces social networking features to the acclaimed Zuma franchise, which has sold over 20 million units worldwide. …

Mega Man creator will not likely join an established publisher or studio

Forget Call of Duty: Black Ops and Halo: Reach – this year’s No.1 game is Alan Wake according to Time Magazine. The US publication named Microsoft’s Xbox 360 exclusive action thriller its game of the year, ahead of Angry Birds in second place and Red Dead Redemption at No.3. Lots …

Gameloft has announced it will release the first high definition games for set-top boxes. The games will be released as part of a partnership with Free, the creators of ambitious set-top box Freebox Revolution. The device comes bundled with a game controller to encourage subscribers to purchase more games. Titles …

Zynga has seen early success with its latest venture CityVille as over 26m users have signed up to play it. The casual Facebook game – which allows users to create and run their own city – went live on December 2nd. It currently has 26,614,646 monthly active users on Facebook …

Announcement inbound, says Sega West vice president Alan Pritchard

GameStop and Jolt Online Gaming have launched Utopia Kingdoms, a new free-to-play Facebok game. The title is based on the popular browser-based Utopia series and allows Facebook users to build and manage their own fantasy kingdom. The launch is the latest move from US retail giant GameStop into the casual …

Wall Street Journal claims Epic will adopt the free-to-use UDK model

Boxing star David Haye will feature in the next episode of EA’s online video games magazine PWNED_, which will hit the internet this Friday December 17th. PWNED_ is EA’s new monthly video magazine that offers exclusive news and insight into the publisher’s upcoming triple-A titles. The London-born WBA World Heavyweight …

With updates and upgrades already rolling out for Sony’s Gran Turismo 5, developer Polyphony Digital has said that it plans to upgrade a number of the title’s in-game cars. In total GT5 includes a little over 1,000 cars. However, only 200 or so of these are ‘Premium’ cars. These boast …