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

The retail figures for January are in and paint a mixed picture, with the good news of an overall like-for-like increase of 1.1 per cent in sales muddied by news that non-food sales slipped 1.6 per cent. Retail Week reports that BRC-KPMG Retail Sales Monitor numbers showed a total sales …

Namco Bandai has confirmed that it has taken back Splatterhouse from Californian studio Bottlerocket. To read more, click here to head over to MCV’s sister mag Develop.

Have you lobbied for an MCV Award yet? If not, you’ve got just under a week to let us know why you or your company should be considered for a finalist spot in this year’s MCV Industry Excellence Awards. The MCV Awards take place at The Brewery, London on Thursday …

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has been awarded the Writers Guild of America’s Videogame Writing prize. The game beat Bethesda’s Fallout 3, EA’s Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 and Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider Underworld to get the prize. Develop has the full story – click here.

Aside from Epic’s recent news about its upcoming third update for Gears of War 2, all is relatively quiet in the Gears of Wars universe – but an admission from one of the game’s key writers suggests that Epic and Microsoft have plenty of Gears surprises on the way. IGN …

EA has lifted the lid on a brand new multiplayer game mode called Ultimate Team that players of FIFA 09 on Xbox 360 and PS3 will be able to download from March 19th. The publisher says that over 141m games of FIA 09 have been played across Xbox 360 and …

Publisher has 'parted ways' with Bottlerocket but still intends to release game this year

Writers Guild of America crowns LucasArts' action-adventure as best writing of 2008

To celebrate the release of its exclusive Grand Theft Auto IV downloadable content next Tuesday , Microsoft is to allow players of the game free access to multiplayer gaming – for a limited time at least. Kotaku reports that from the release of The Lost and the Damned on February …

Sega Sammy Holdings has revealed a net loss of YEN 10.8bn, around $119m, for the nine months ending December 31st 2008 – an improvement of around 33 per cent compared the YEN 15.7bn loss seen in the same period in the year before. Sales for the period were down 15.4 …