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

The Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2008 will take place between August 10th and 12th this year at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre – and registration is now open for those who would like to attend . The festival will feature a two-day conference program, networking events and an expanded EIF Games …

Mobile games publisher issues open invitation to mobile and handheld developer communities

After last week laying off 100 staff at its San Francisco HQ, fresh reports say LucasArts will fire its remaining 100 staff as the company prepares to withdraw from internal development completely. Shacknews says a ‘reliable source’ has told the site that George Lucas’ games development studio will move towards …

Russian games publisher 1C has announced its first games developed for multiple platforms – and revealed it is targeting global growth with the two games. Internally-made Captain Blood is a Xbox 360 and PC Caribbean-themed game inspired by the novels by Rafael Sabatini. "1C is using cutting-edge technology, including the …

Event returns in August, having moved to cityâ??s International Conference Centre

The head of US gamers’ consumers group the Entertainment Consumers Association has said that he knows of two more games companies that are planning to leave US publisher body the Entertainment Software Association. Hal Halpin told the Washington Post that a duo of firms were set to join Activision, Vivendi …

Sony’s PSP continues to dominate the Japanese hardware market, after clocking up 270,750 sales in May. According to data exclusively given to MCV by our media partner Famitsu/Enterbrain, the handheld took 37.3 per cent of all console sales in the month. It was followed by Wii, which shifted 220,052 units …

Optical disc hardware specialist Singulus has received orders for 21 Blu-Ray dual-layer duplication machines in the first quarter of this year – a faster adoption than of the format’s predeccesor DVD 11 years ago. "This means that the orders for Blu-ray in the first year of the dual layer technology …

Russian firm powers up - internally-made game using Unreal Engine 3, PhysX and DX10

Xbox president Robbie Bach has criticised Blu-Ray’s lack of sales success since the HD-DVD format imploded – and questioned why consumers would bother upscaling from DVD. Speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle, Bach also ruled out any possibility of a Blu-Ray enabled Xbox – either in this or the next …