As MCV is getting ready to deliver its daily issues at Gamescom in a few weeks, our regular August issue is out now and ready to fly to Cologne – you can read it for free here.
Our Gamescom issue this year is also a QA and outsourcing special, with Pole to Win’s CEO Deborah Kirkham headlining this edition. Pole to Win’s ambitions are pleasingly simple: be “better, faster, cheaper, in more locations and more languages.” But achieving them is still no easy task. We talk to Kirkham and European president Andy Emery about running a company that enables a lot of the industry to go global.
We also talk to QA professionals from the UK and beyond to discuss how they deliver polished products – while it’s the programmers, artists and designers that receive the plaudits, the industry would be lost without its diligent and skilled QA teams.
Meanwhile, following up on Sega’s acquisition of Two Point Studios, we have a chat with Sega Europe’s head of content Bobby Wertheim, who works at the firm’s incubation programme, Searchlight. He details why the firm wants to acquire indie studios, what we can expect from the publishing label and what the process is like when you sign up with Searchlight.
Our third regional spotlight is also featured in this August issue. Destination: Hamburg, Germany. Following a successful transition from free-to-play browser games to much much more, the ‘epicenter of gaming in Germany’ has a lot to offer, from an excellent quality of life to the support of an incomparable cluster of games talent.
Elsewhere, we take a look behind the scenes at the development of Baba is You. Developer Arvi ‘Hempuli’ Teikari talks about how he built layers upon layers of complexities – and thought it better to leave it unexplained to the player.
Last but not least, we also look back at what we’ve learnt from Develop:Brighton and catch up with Keywords following its acquisition of Japanese developer Wizcorp.
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:
