MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Starting May 2017 developers whose games contain random loot box drops will be required to reveal the underlying odds. Games such as Overwatch, Hearthstone and Counter-Strike reward players who both complete in-game tasks and pay cash with digital loot boxes, the contents of which vary. Rare and valuable items can …
Read More »GAME to open central London location
It appears that High Street retailer GAME is set to open one of its new arena locations in central London. That’s going by a post made by SVP of eSports and competitive gaming strategy Craig Fletcher on Twitter (below) which shows a store under construction with the address ‘162-170 Wardour …
Read More »Amazon boasts of record Black Friday sales for its Fire and Echo devices
The own-brand devices of the internet’s largest retailer had a bumper Black Friday weekend. Amazon has said that sales of the Amazon Fire TV were two and a half times larger than they were last year, helped in part no doubt by the big discounts. The device is still the …
Read More »SD cards will soon come with an app performance rating
Buyers of SD cards will soon be able to more accurately assess whether their purchase will be able to run applications as smoothly as if they were installed on integrated memory. With many portable devices designed to have their storage bolstered by external cards, it’s easy to forget that the …
Read More »Koch Media on its Superindie distribution label and the state of the indie retail sector
Only 4.7 per cent of UK physical sales of games are generated through indie retailers, according to Kantar Worldpanel’s annual survey. Competing with High Street giants such as GAME and online behemoths like Amazon: that’s the daily struggle of indie retailers. Which is why distributor Koch Media decided to launch …
Read More »1.9m games were sold during Black Friday week
The numbers are in for what looks to have been a massive Black Friday week. 1,936,636 games were sold for the week ending November 26th, according to GfK figures. That’s a nine per cent increase on last year’s 1,778,851 games. Meanwhile, 58.4m was generated in revenue for the sales period, …
Read More »‘Black Friday is the worst thing to happen to retail’
The Black Friday sales event has had a deeply negative effect on games retail. That’s according to sources speaking to MCV, who say that the period is ‘the worst thing’ to happen to shops. Retailers say that Black Friday is a major factor in the UK software market being down, …
Read More »Star Citizen dev promises to share current production schedules
With a release date seemingly no closer to arriving, RSI has said that it will now publicise updated internal production schedules on a regular basis. We have taken a lot of flak over the last couple of years for the extending timeline of Star Citizen, but the simple fact is …
Read More »Vive and Oculus Rift sales predicted to hit 770k by year end
2016 has been the year of VR, but how many units are actually in the hands of consumers? That’s the big question that still hangs over the sector, and one that SuperData has now tried to answer. As reported by Upload VR, the research specialist predicts the following install bases …
Read More »UK physical games market down 50% year-on-year
Last week, the UK boxed games market was down by more than 50 per cent year-on-year. According to GfK figures, the sales period for the week ending Saturday, November 12th 2016 saw 651,637 games sold, a 52 per cent dip when compared with the week ending Saturday, November 14th 2015. …
Read More »