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

With release dates slipping as titles need â??further development timeâ?? and louder groans from coders regarding the trials of contemporary CPUs, we look at how the increasingly contradictory nature of development â?? with studios asked to make one game for a variety of different machines â?? has impacted the industryâ?¦

Online retailer Play.com is celebrating a record breaking Q4 for the firm which delivered year-on-year growth of 24 per cent, with December itself showing a 29 per cent improvement compared to 2006. Customer activity peaked on December 3rd, with Play processing an average of 700 orders per minute and enjoying …

Earlybird discount deadline for February event nears

Following a period of ongoing disruption to Xbox Live that saw many festive gamers miss out on a week of sitting in their pants shooting American teenagers online, rumours claim that Microsoft is planning a peace offering to those who pay a subscription to access the service. Problems with the …

Although weâ??re over a year into the current hardware cycle, itâ??s safe to say that itâ??s only with a recent crop of releases that the generation is finally living up to claims that new hardware can enable more believable characters.

Cash to grow development team and widen publishing portfolio

The Game Equation releases Deep Blue Sea

With a booming internet market that currently includes approximately 42 million users, the hunger for online gaming is set to rapidly grow in India this year, according to BusinessWeek . Currently only five per cent of India’s web users are active gamers, according to information from ICube, but an increasing …

Joystiq reports that Bill Gates could use his final Consumer Electronics Show keynote to reveal a new Xbox 360 model with an integrated HD-DVD player – putting the console on a par with PS3 and its built-in Blu-Ray functionality. The report adds that platform holder Microsoft could also be preparing …

Halo Wars studio's new base to house 120 staff