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

Warner has thrown its weight behind Square Enix’s bid to buy UK publisher Eidos. The news comes following the announcement last week that Square had made an offer to buy the ailing Britsoft firm. Time Warner owns a 20 per cent stake in Eidos, and although it was often seen …

Aristen hopes its new FxStudio special effects suite will kick-start interest in an overlooked area of games technology, discovers Jon Jordanâ?¦

A slew of Wii and DS software will fail to make it to store shelves as retailers are forced to be more selective with the games they stock, MCV can reveal. The news follows a Christmas that featured an unprecedented amount of new software for all formats, with publishers moving …

Bushnell, Livingstone and more to deliver key speeches; Develop reader discount unveiled

Leading games industry figures have signed up to speak at next month’s Game Based Learning Conference. Capitalising on the success of the Handheld Learning Conference, Game Based Learning (GBL) will evaluate all aspects of games in education, and will feature speeches from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Eidos co-founder Ian Livingstone …

During the Activision Blizzard Q4 earnings call it emerged that two games based on James Bond are being developed by Bizarre Creations. Little is known about the two games. One is a racer that will see launch towards the end of 2009, while the other is a new James Bond …

University of London college looks to collaborative research opportunities

Sony is the only one of the three platform holders to not yet issue a statement after NPD’s January stats for the North American market showed that PS3 was the only major console to see an annual decline in monthly sales . The numbers showed that whilst Wii sales grew …

Nintendo remained seemingly untouchable in January according to the latest NPD stats, and has claimed that the growth seen in both the Wii and DS market is helping the overall games sector by offsetting declines on other platforms ”. The overall January market in North America grew by $150m compared …

Xbox 360 has continued to defy expectations by posting yet another monthly annual sales increase, with January sales of Xbox 360 climbing by 33 per cent year-on-year to hit 309,000 units according to NPD . January was also the strongest ever month for the firm’s online platform Xbox Live, which …