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

Just days after it emerged that Scratch: Ultimate DJ developer Genius Productions had filed a lawsuit against Activision regarding its upcoming DJ Hero, a court has dismissed the allegations. The LA Superior Court found that there was no evidence of wrongdoing” relating to Activision’s purchase of former Scratch: Ultimate DJ …

A rush of 120,000 users heading online to play Demigod should be good news for Stardock’s MMO Demigod, despite the resulting server woes – but when 102,000 of those users are playing a pirated copy of the game, it becomes a major concern. Speaking on the official Demigod site, the …

Play.com has recruited Patrick Kelly as its new head of games. Kelly joins Play with a wealth of industry knowledge, having held a similar position at Zavvi before the chain’s closure earlier this year. Prior to Zavvi, Kelly had worked within games for Virgin Retail. These are incredibly exciting times …

US analyst Cowan and Company has stated that it believes Rockstar’s recently released Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars sold just 89,000 units on DS in the territory in March. The firm had originally predicted that the game could sell as many as 450,000 units upon its release in North America. …

Gaming has gone through many changes over the years, but 2008 was most definitely when the self-improvement and non-gaming software genre came into its own. Although traditional titles continued to break new ground and fare well commercially, any advances made were comparatively small to those made in the self-improvement market. …

Overwhelming response to our Quality of Life survey - but have you had your say?

The founders of the BitTorrent Pirate Bay website have been found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’ this morning – with all four execs given custodial sentences. In a landmark case in the differentiation between file-sharers and pirates, the Swedish Court found Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, …

Microsoft was understandably upbeat following the release of NPD’s March statistics, which showed that Xbox 360 was the only console to see year-on-year hardware sales increases. The 360 sold 330,000 units throughout the month, a 25 per cent increase on the same month in 2008. The numbers, the platform holder …

Hollywood’s flirtation with online gaming is developing into a committed relationship – with Paramount the latest Tinseltown giant to bypass retail for a major movie tie-in. The studio has created a download-only game of its new Star Trek movie – disregarding the opportunity to release a boxed product spin-off of …

Sony neglected to make any mention of PS3 hardware sales in its response to NPD’s March numbers, which showed year-on-year declines for the machine, and instead chose to focus on its unquestionably strong 2009 software line-up. Guerilla’s Killzone 2 has now sold more than one million copies worldwide since its …