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

The French Senate has passed a new law designed to crack down on internet file-sharing as the battle against online IP theft reaches the continent. Music Week reports that the French Senate has recently passed a three strikes and you’re out” law raised by President Sarkozy which, as the name …

Leading US retailer (and owner of UK supermarket Asda) is to replace much of its in-store music CD offering with an increased Blu-ray and consumer electronics presence. Home Media Magazine reports that Wal-Mart made the decision after seeing music CD sales slump by 23 per cent in the first month …

Tool development and consulting outfit offers its wares to development industry

It appears as though yesterday’s revelation of a downscaling at Juice Games may have just been the start of a massive cull of THQ’s internal development resources. For the full low-down, head over to the only bookmark you need for the day’s global development news, Develop.

The boss of Sony Computer Entertainment UK Ray Maguire has stated that he believes third party developers will in future use PS3 as their lead platform and then remove elements of their titles when porting across to Xbox 360. To read more, head over to the online home of Develop …

SCE UK boss Ray Maguire says more third parties will embrace PS3 as lead development platform

Nintendo’s revamped DSi handheld will include 256MB of internal memory, it has been revealed, though half of it will be taken up by downloading the free Opera web browser. Unfortunately, web browsing was criticised for being very slow, with sites such as Yahoo News reportedly taking over a minute to …

Reports claim Paradigm, Mass Media, Locomotive, Sandblast all closed; Rainbow also suffers job cuts

Video games have been linked to aggression in the young in a new comparative studies from the US and Japan. According to The Telegraph (in a story also reported in worldwide news outlets such as CNN and Fox News) the results, which were published in this month’s journal Pediatrics, showed …

Leading casual mobile and portable games publisher Gameloft has announced Q3 2008 sales of €26.2 million – numbers that are eight per cent up on the same period from 2007. Mobile titles accounted for 98 per cent of the firm’s sales, with the combined output for DS, WiiWare and Xbox …