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

Indie chain Game Player has closed its doors, and MD Gary Noakes says that the days of specialist retailers are all but over. Pre-owned specialist Game Player decided to only stock used games following tighter and tighter margins on new releases. However, with increased pressure from the banks and growing …

Call of Duty may be the game of the moment – but online giant Bigpoint wants to steal the game’s audience away to high-end titles played via web browsers. The German firm has told MCV it plans to seriously grow its UK audience next year, using big TV ad campaigns …

It was the week Take That reformed. The week a new Harry Potter movie premiered.But the real winner in the entertainment war? It was a video game. Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops led a software market boom last week. Day one sales stood at 1.4m units, generating 58m in …

Analyst Cowen and Company is claiming that the most recent title in the Tony Hawk series, Tony Hawk’s Shred, sold just 3,000 copies in its first week on sale in the US. The game was a virtual no show”, the analyst is quoted as saying by GamesIndustry. It adds that …

The 2010 stock allocation for Kinect is just days away from running out, Microsoft has warned US consumers. Speaking at a Web 2/0 Summit in the US, Microsoft’s president of the Interactive Entertainment Business Don Mattrick said that anyone who wants a Kinect this Christmas has been advised by Microsoft …

Staff at renowned Liverpool studio Bizarre Creations have spoken of a twenty-four-hour emotional rollercoaster as it has emerged that several companies have shown interest in buying the Blur developer. Last night Activision put Bizarre Creations up for sale – in a move that put the job security of 200 developers …

Heiko Hubertz on how to dominate the browser gaming space

The first images of what pertain to be the still secretive PSP2 have appeared online. You can see them both below. VG247 says the images are of the dev kit that until recently had been doing the rounds. However, it has since been superseded by a single brick design that …

Handful of firms declare interest in the Liverpool-based Blur studio, sources tell Develop

While Microsoft has claimed a notable victory in the US hardware market last month, Sony has highlighted the strength of PS3s software sales in its response to NPDs latest report. The platform holder says it enjoyed an incredibly strong October” and that the PS3 was the only format to enjoy …