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

UK games retail will overcome economic pressure in 2009 and enjoy another profitable 12 months, according to this year’s MCV Retail Survey. The survey features responses from a wide variety of UK retail store managers from the likes of GAME, Blockbuster, Gamestation, HMV, and a range of independent stores. 86 …

UK bookmaker Ladbrokes and partner ELSPA have unveiled the official contenders for this year’s title of Christmas Number One Game, and has named Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: World at War as the favourite. Christmas 2008 will be yet another great year for video games and we are all dying …

Tim Schaferâ??s studio to produce rock â??nâ?? roll adventure game

Lips sing-off sees party gaming specialists to the finish line

Tekken 6’s director Katsuhiro Harada has revealed Europe and the US were a big influence in the decision to make the long-running beat-‘em-up series a multiformat proposition. At the moment we have two high spec consoles on the market at the same time; the Xbox has a huge installed base …

Economic downturn and slow holiday sales in the US and Europe to blame

Mainstream retailers, from electricals outlets to supermarkets, have outperformed specialist game retailers in a recent survey of retail websites. The Retail Bulletin study judged sites on a range of criteria, including function, accessibility, code quality, and performance. Specialist website testing company Sitemorse gathered the survey data using an automated testing …

Just minutes after news of EUK’s demise – and the loss of around 700 jobs – it has emerged that the distributor’s administrator Deloitte has called in Ernst & Young to restructure Zavvi’s management team in a bid to claw back some 106m owed to EUK. Zavvi, which previously traded …

Deloitte, the administrator handling the closure of Woolworths and distribution arm EUK, has confirmed that it is to step down its efforts to try and find a buyer for the distributor. It also confirmed MCV’s earlier report that 700 staff were this morning made redundant, and that a skeleton staff …

MCV understands that workers at the Woolworths-owned distributor EUK have this morning been told that today is their last day in employment, following administrator Deloitte’s failure to find a buyer for the company. It is understood that around 90 per cent of the workforce has been made redundant after a …