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

StarCraft II is going free-to-play, Blizzard announced during their keynote address at Blizzcon. The game, originally released in 2010, will be going free-to-play starting on November 14, although some aspects will remain premium only. The Wings of Liberty campaign is free, the ranked ladder is a free unlock and commanders …

During Blizzard’s keynote speech at Blizzcon, they unveiled their newest Hearthstone’s latest expansion: Kobolds & Catacombs. This is the third and final expansion park for 2017, Hearthstone’s Year of the Mammoth. It brings 135 new cards themed around, well, kobolds and catacombs. It’ll launch in December, but players logging in …

The Pokemon Go developer buys the developer behind the app that lets you put photos on to 3D avatars to make your own movies

The free-to-play MOBA will continue under a small support team but the development studio will close and jobs lost

We’re still getting stuck into Call of Duty: WW2, but tucked away in the game’s Normandy Beach social space is a bizarre esports treat: the 1v1 pit. The Pit, situated out on the beach and sealed in from the player-soldiers running around on the beach by impassable wooden barriers and …

New stats from ESA Canada shows the growing impact of the games industry in the country.

The Esports Championship Series, better known merely by the acronym ECS, is becoming an institution in the worldwide Counter-Strike calendar. With the news that the finals for ECS Season 4 are taking place in a luxury hotel in Cancun, instead of the crowded Wembley Arena, we spoke to Michele Attisani, …

The move is supposed to encourage growth in the US tech industry but has been met with criticism over other issues within the reform around low income

The release of the iPhone X has propelled Apple close to the point of becoming the world’s first ever trillion-dollar company. Apple’s share price hit an all-time high on Wednesday after a 19 per cent surge on news of record pre-orders for the iPhone X. The news came as a …

The move from physical to digital is happening faster than most analysts had predicted. A report from Games Industry shows that in some instances, triple-A console titles are seeing as much as 45 per cent of their sales being claimed by digital. Indeed, Activision just yesterday revealed that digital sales …