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

Microsoft has claimed that the total time spent by gamers using its Xbox Live service has surpassed 17 billion hours. Company employee Trixie360 added on her Twitter: That’s more than two hours for every person on the planet.” G4 observed that this equates to around 2 million years, or 850 …

The UK took too long to recognise the cultural and financial merits of video games, Eidos Life President Ian Livingstone has said at the Westminster eForum. Speaking at the eForum debate on the future of the UK game industry in Whitehall, London, Livingstone criticised the national news media’s tendency to …

Frontier founder says the UK sector continues to shrink

Rising Star has won the publishing rights to Samuari Shodown Sen – the latest entry in the long-running fighting franchise. The title is an Xbox 360 port of the arcade game of the same name, and is the eleventh entry in the classic SNK series. Rising Star also believes the …

MCV’s vital weekly retail digest, RetailBiz, is now available to view online and download now. Click here to access the RetailBiz Previews section, where you’ll find an in-depth guide to some of the hottest titles due for release in the near future. This week, we take the plunge with 2K …

Iconic Russian puzzler Tetris, first developed in 1984, has now achieved 100m paid downloads across all mobile formats since EA Mobile bagged the mobile rights in 2005. It was first made available for mobile by G-Mode in Japan in 2001, so the lifetime sales total is actually even greater than …

Publisher EA is on the verge of acquiring Canadian venture capitalist firm VanEdge Capital – a company formed by six former EA employees. peHUB reports that the deal is expected to be finalised later this month. Partners include EA’s former chief visual and technical officer Glenn Entis, former EA China …

Dev kit for Amazon's high-end e-reader entering beta next month

With Apple odds-on to lift the lid on its long-rumoured tablet Mac the iSlate next Wednesday, reports have claimed that video games publisher EA is working closely with Apple to bring some of its gaming IP to the new machine. Gaming is expected to form a big part of the …

Wow! What an end to a year and a decade. Four industry luminaries were awarded honours in the New Year Honours list: Rod Cousens, Paul and Oliver Collyer and my predecessor, Paul Jackson. Congratulations to them all for the well-deserved recognition for their outstanding contribution to our industry. Modern Warfare …