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

Steel City Interactive, developer of the critically and commercially successful Undisputed video game franchise, today announces that industry leader Murray Pannell has joined the company as Head of Publishing. The newly created position, which will report directly to VP of Studio Tim Coupe, will see Pannell lead publishing for Steel City Interactive as it plans for the launch of Undisputed 2.

KONAMI has announced a multi-year partnership extension with the French Football Federation (FFF). Continuing this successful partnership since 2022, various commercial, imagery and activation rights remain, as KONAMI maintains its affiliation as the ‘Official Football Video Game Partner of the French National Team’.

The Danish publicly traded computer game company Trophy Games is acquiring the French game developer Playrion from Paradox Interactive. This is the largest acquisition in Trophy Games' history and will form the foundation for a new series of simulation games. At the same time, the company is raising its revenue expectations for the year to €22.8-€24.1 million . With the acquisition of French Playrion, Trophy Games gains 30 new employees and a new foundation for future growth.

Ludo.ai, the developer’s companion for creating production-ready games assets, today announced its new AI Texture Generator feature, giving game developers a faster way to create seamless static and animated textures for environments, surfaces and props.

Bitmap Books has announced its latest title, The Arcade 1971–1999: The Stories Behind Classic Coin-Ops, Told by Their Creators, a comprehensive deep dive into the games that changed an industry forever.

The creators of Arma and DayZ are investing in Polish studio Enjoy Studio. The investment reflects confidence in the team’s talent and lays the foundation for a closer, long-term partnership aimed at bringing players the best games possible.

Cheating in online multiplayer games has become a structured, professional ecosystem, bolstered in recent years by the introduction of generative AI. Cheat subscriptions, boosting services, and in-game economy manipulation have made the cheating market worth around $8.5 billion globally. One cheat developer in 2021 was found to have made an estimated $77 million providing a cheat service for a single game. 

Curve Games has announced a major new publishing partnership with independent developer Wayfinder Studios for Wyldheart, the highly anticipated co-op action RPG, in a deal that represents the publisher’s largest investment in recent years.

VaultN, the infrastructure trusted by the games industry's leading publishers and retailers to orchestrate digital distribution at scale, announces the launch of VaultN Payments & Wallet - an embedded B2B payments, treasury and compliance feature built in partnership with global payments platform Paysafe. 

HYPERTUNE, a COMPREADY company, today announced the public release of its Gaming Performance Engineering platform, built on Intel'sⓇ Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) SDK. By combining Intel's trusted performance technologies with its proprietary validation methodology, HYPERTUNE helps gamers safely unlock more performance from supported Intel-based PCs through a guided, validation-first optimization experience.