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

Rampant piracy is the real reason for GTA: Chinatown Wars’ slow sales according to Take-Two CEO Ben Feder. On paper, Chinatown Wars should have been a massive success when it launched on the Nintendo DS a year ago. GTA remains one of the most successful game franchises of all time, …

Karaoke hit U-Sing returns this year in Girls Night for Wii, Mindscape has announced. The firm is confident its singing franchise – developed in partnership with Universal Music – can compete with Sony’s SingStar and Microsoft’s Lips franchise as the market’s most popular karaoke game. We have all the ingredients: …

Activision put a mammoth marketing campaign behind the launch of Modern Warfare 2 DLC. 1m is being spent to promote the downloadable Stimulus Package, which adds a host of new multiplayer maps to the world’s fastest-selling game. The publisher has made the investment to spearhead a marketing campaign that targets …

Alistair Darling’s Budget was a landmark moment for the games industry – but UK studios most show they are worth the 90m invested in them. That’s the message from industry bosses who say the UK has to promote itself as a global force in order to beef up its studios …

Tiga and ELSPA (sorry, UKIE) should be likewise singled out for applause after lobbying so hard and presenting the industry so well to the people that matter during the last two years. Same goes for people like Ian Livingstone – you couldn’t interview the man of late without him (rightly) …

With the hype train slowly getting into gear ahead of the arrival of Codemasters’ action-packed FPS Bodycount early next year, Codemasters has said that the failure of its most recent FPS Turning Point has been forgotten. Upon its release in March 2008, Spark Unlimited’s shooter debuted at no.17 in the …

A routine Bank Holiday sale or an effort to encourage struggling hardware sales – call it what you want, but PSPgo owners old and new will be greeted with some significant discounts the next time they log into the PSN Store. Several high-profile titles have seen their prices slashed on …

Though many think that cloud gaming could be the dominant force in the next generation of gaming, one analyst has predicted that the failure of services such as OnLive to embrace modern gaming trends could leave them floundering. What OnLive will not do, at least not at this point, is …

With Sony having dealt its first major hand in the motion control battle by revealing some of its debut Move software offerings, the industry is patiently waiting for Microsoft to do the same – and Xbox director of product management Aaron Greenberg has promised that Natal’s games won’t disappoint. The …

Investment bank Ibis Capital pick apart the figures in modern games development