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

Amidst all the talk of NPD’s March year-on-year hardware sales comparisons, chart-topping software battles and third party revenue numbers, Sony and Microsoft both chose to play the PR game on another front – Metacritic review aggregations. In its post-March response, Sony stated that: Approximately one in every three PS3 titles …

Legendary US sports broadcaster John Madden has announced that he is to retire from TV commentating, but publisher EA has insisted that it doesn’t mean the end of their long-running relationship between Madden and its NFL games franchise. As you can imagine, we’ve had dozens of questions today about what …

Dubbed by many as the first person shooter that will revolutionize the genre on Wii, the developer of The Conduit has stated that the game will be released in North America on June 23rd. Joystiq obtained the news from High Voltage Software’s Eric Nofsinger. A European date for the game …

Western-looking Japanese publisher Square Enix has lifted the lid on a brand new WWII strategy title called Order of War, which will be released on PC in Europe this autumn. The game, which promises to feature massive scale battles brought to life with a cinematic intensity never seen before in …

As over a third of surveyed developers claim that game-skills have aided their careers

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. …