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

Games retail has drawn up contingency plans ahead of strike action by Royal Mail staff, MCV can reveal. Disruption to delivery services has been affecting parts of the UK already, which has forced online specialists including Play, Amazon, Gameseek, ShopTo, SimplyGames, The Hut and Zoombits to source rival postal firms. …

Reports suggest that Sony has made numerous staff cuts at the dev studio behind popular PSN title Pain – a game which saw more downloads than any other on the PlayStation Store by Nov 2007. Head over to Develop for the full story.

Peter Molyneux confirms motion support for his studioâ??s Xbox 360 RPG

Viacom’s global kids entertainment network Nickelodeon has paid 5.9m to capture the worldwide rights to the popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles brand from The Mirage Group. The firm has pledged to continue working with many of the Turtles’ existing licensing partners, though question marks remain over the long-term future of …

Publishing rights to Russian studio 4A Games’ long-in-the-works Metro 2033 have been bought by THQ. The publisher will release the game on 360 and PC next year. Metro 2033 is based on a best-selling Russian novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky and is built with 4A’s cutting edge proprietary engine. For the …

After what must have been a prolonged period of number crunching, Gamasutra has concluded that 15 per cent of the total revenue generated by Call of Duty: World at War in North America has come from sales of additional digital content for the game. In total this represents $45m, taking …

AUDIO SPECIAL: The Audio Guys talk to Develop about contributing to Forza 3

In news that isn’t all that surprising, Microsoft’s European creative director of Microsoft Game Studios Peter Molyneux has confirmed that Lionhead’s upcoming RPG Fable III will support the motion-sensing Natal camera. News first came from Gamesbrief’s Nicholas Lovell, who was in the audience at Molyneux’s BAFTA seminar last night. Seeing …

Many headlines on the internet this morning will lead you to believe that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed overnight plans to release an external Blu-ray drive for Xbox 360. Whether this is actually the case or not remains to be seen. The furore comes courtesy of an interview with Gizmodo. …

High street retailers have been accused of locking new IPs out of the market this Christmas – and limiting consumer choice by only dedicating shelf space to ‘formulaic sequels’ and pre-owned games. In a letter to MCV, Rising Star Games’ MD and COO Martin Defries said that new content and …