MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
The latest issue of MCV/DEVELOP is out now – you can read it for free here.
This month we sat down with CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, who runs us through what the company has taken to calling “The EVE Effect” – How, over the past 17 years, EVE Online has brought people together and taught them valuable life skills that can apply in the workplace and in their wider lives. Pétursson also explains EVE’s Chaos Era, and the future for the space-faring MMO.
Also, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic forcing us all to work for home for the foreseeable future, we reached out to the games industry to see how managers can best support their teams during this crisis, ensuring that employees remain productive, happy and healthy during this crisis.
The next console generation is just around the corner now, bringing us the first ever SSD-equipped consoles, capable of loading data one hundred times faster than ever before. We spoke to developers about the impact on engineering and design, as well as the exciting potential for the future.
With a number of titles hosting the Government’s ‘Stay at Home, Save Lives’ messaging during this crisis, the importance in-game advertising has been pushed to the forefront. We spoke to Bidstack’s Charlotte Cook about how games can bring topical and positive messages to increasingly hard to reach ‘digital native’ audiences.
We also reached out to Moonshine Studios and Coatsink, respectively developer and publisher of first to Stadia title Get Packed, and find out about the benefits of developing for Stadia – particularly at the end of a console cycle, freed from having to develop for older machines.
Sumo Digital used its annual results to demonstrate that there’s more creativity in its studios than its ‘work for hire’ label would suggest. We find out why development shouldn’t be a bottleneck in getting games in market in this pandemic-struck year.
A recent survey by the External Development Summit (XDS) Advisory Committee showed that 86 per cent of developers were concerned by the impact of COVID-19 on worldwide game development. We look into the issues raised for both XDev providers and their clients.
With the lockdown forcing us all apart from our friends and loved ones during a uniquely stressful time, we look into how Popcannibal’s BAFTA award-winning Kind Words might just be the perfect quarantine game. We talk to Ziba Scott about the game’s surprisingly political beginnings, its incredible success and how it attracted a kinder, patient playerbase.
Plus there’s coverage of events from around the industry, development regulars and our Final Boss, where we have not one, but two this month. We talk to Coconut Lizard’s Robert Troughton and, in celebration of their tenth birthday, Green Man Gaming’s Paul Sulyok.
The latest digital edition can be read here for free (and is embedded below) and here are the full contents of this month’s issue:
