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

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 …

It looks as if publisher Sega and developer Platinum Games have successfully agreed terms on a deal to extend the partnership between the two. In October the release of manic Xbox 360 and PS3 shooter Vanquish marked the official end of the four game deal both companies had previously signed. …

The struggling music genre just needs one big hit to get it out of the doldrums, says EA’s worldwide music executive Steve Schnur. And he hinted to MCV that EA has a few titles on the way that could be just the answer. His comments came in response to questions …

The three Square Enix CEOs reveal their strategy to build the first truly global game developer

OnLive has been granted the ‘cloud gaming’ patent its CEO had filed eight years ago. Steve Perlman applied for the patent protection back in 2002. Today he declined to comment on whether he would, or could, sue rival firms that use similar technology. The patent will likely intensify the enmity …