About MCV

MCV

MCV, now published as MCV/Develop, is a British trade magazine for the video games industry, first printed in September 1998 and still published in London, in England, in print and digital editions. Originally named The Market for Computer and Video Games, and for most of its life known simply as MCV, it focuses on the business aspects of the industry rather than on games as entertainment. It is published monthly by Biz Media, a subsidiary of Datateam Media Group, is edited by Richie Shoemaker, runs the MCV/Develop Awards held annually since 2002, and marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first issue in September 2023 with its 992nd numbered edition.

MCV is the trade paper of record for the British games business. Where consumer magazines reviewed games for players, MCV has covered publishers, retailers, distributors, developers, recruitment and technology as an industry, first as a weekly and since 2019 as a monthly under the combined MCV/Develop name, which revived the title of its former sister magazine Develop. Its website is mcvuk.com, and its history, through five owners in two decades, mirrors the consolidation of British games media itself.

Origins in Computer Trade Weekly and the 1998 launch

MCV was started in September 1998 by former employees of Computer Trade Weekly, universally known as CTW. Its founding team comprised Stuart Dinsey as editor, Lisa Foster, later Lisa Carter, as deputy editor, Alex Jarvis, later Alex Moreham, as sales manager, and Dave Roberts. CTW had been published weekly from September 1984 and by 1998 was the official newspaper for ELSPA, the European Leisure Software Publishers Association, and the creator and sponsor of the European Computer Trade Show.

Dinsey's own account, recorded in the magazine's twenty-fifth anniversary history and in the first episode of the MCV/Develop Podcast in 2023, explains the route out of CTW. He had built CTW into a formidable champion of the United Kingdom games industry across a period from the tail end of the 8-bit era to the arrival of the Sony PlayStation. In June 1998, during the football World Cup, he handed in his notice, having been approached by the German publisher Computec Media, which had listed on the Hamburg stock exchange and wanted to export its German trade magazine, Markt für Computer und Videospiele, to Britain, keeping the name in translated form: The Market for Computer and Video Games, shortened to MCV. Dinsey took much of the team that had established CTW with him, starting with Foster and Jarvis.

A trade magazine, not a games magazine

MCV's category is essential to understanding it. It is a video game industry trade magazine, classified alongside business-to-business titles, and its circulation was audited on that basis, with a total circulation of 10,065 recorded for 2009. Its readers are people who make, publish, sell and distribute games, not the public who buy them. Its content covers business news, publishing, retail, distribution, development, recruitment, people moves and industry events, with analysis aimed at professionals deciding what to stock, fund, publish or build.

That trade focus explains both its longevity and its form. A weekly trade title could charge for its value as a business tool and could sustain advertising from publishers, distributors and service companies that needed to reach the whole British trade. The magazine was originally published in both the United States and the United Kingdom; the American print edition was discontinued in 2000, while the British edition remains in print and its digital edition remains available internationally.

Ownership: Computec, Intent, NewBay, Future and Biz Media

MCV has been owned by a sequence of publishers that illustrates the churn in British business media. Computec Media published it from September 1998 until about April 2002. Intent Media, the company Dinsey founded to run it, owned it from about April 2002 until December 2012. Dinsey left MCV in 2013, after selling it a year earlier; he went on to become chairman of Curve Digital and a board director of the industry body Ukie. NewBay Media owned MCV from December 2012 until April 2018, when it was acquired by Future plc. Future held it only until December 2018, when it sold several of its business-to-business brands, including MCV, to Datateam Media Group. That deal completed in January 2019, with Datateam forming a new subsidiary, Biz Media, as the parent for the former Future brands, and Biz Media remains its publisher.

Each transfer was reported by the magazine itself as industry news, since the buying and selling of games media was part of the business it covered. The archival record is unusually complete: the Video Game History Foundation Library holds 465 magazines in its MCV collection, including physical issues dating back to May 1999 and digital issues from 2008 to 2019 and from 2022 to 2025.

Absorbing Develop and becoming MCV/Develop

In November 2017 NewBay Media, then MCV's owner, announced that the websites, magazines and events of its sister titles Develop and Esports Pro would be absorbed into MCV by early 2018, with the combined magazine moving to a monthly frequency. Develop had been a monthly British trade magazine for game developers since August 1996, running for twenty-one years and 189 issues before it was discontinued at the end of 2017 and absorbed into MCV.

In October 2019, under Biz Media, MCV was rebranded as MCV/Develop, resurrecting the Develop name following its closure in 2018 and formalising the combination. The title has since been published monthly in print and digital formats as MCV/Develop, covering both the commercial business that was MCV's original territory and the development craft, technology and studio culture that had been Develop's. The combined title's ISSN remains 1469-4832, MCV's original identifier.

Editors

Stuart Dinsey was MCV's founding editor and its defining figure for its first fifteen years, until his departure in 2013. Seth Barton edited the magazine, by then becoming MCV/Develop, from 2016 to 2021, when he left to join PlayStation. He was replaced by Richie Shoemaker, who took over on 1 November 2021 and remains editor. Shoemaker came to the role after about twenty years working across numerous gaming magazines and websites, and he co-hosts the MCV/Develop Podcast launched in 2023.

The pattern of editors moving between the trade title and the industry it covers, Dinsey to a publisher chairmanship and a Ukie board seat, Barton to PlayStation, is characteristic of trade publishing, where the magazine functions as a meeting point for an industry small enough for its journalists and its executives to know one another personally.

The MCV/Develop Awards

The MCV/Develop Awards are an annual awards show held since 2002, open to publishers, retail and distribution, with entries peer-voted and judged by an independent panel of specialists. By 2023 the awards covered the full breadth of the British industry, with categories including recruitment agency of the year, creative and co-development partner of the year, quality assurance and localisation partner of the year and hardware innovation of the year, in which the shortlist that year ranged from Valve's Steam Deck to Panic's Playdate.

The 2023 awards, held on 11 May 2023 at 8 Northumberland Avenue in London, doubled as the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of MCV's first issue. Winners were decided by a combination of panel voting and a public vote. Alongside the main awards, the brand runs the MCV/Develop Women in Games Awards, whose ninth annual edition took place in London on 1 March 2023, a fixture that reflects the trade title's role in the industry's professional and diversity agenda as well as its commercial news.

The twenty-fifth anniversary in 2023

MCV marked twenty-five years since its first issues rolled off the presses in September 1998 throughout 2023. Its September 2023 edition was numbered 992 and presented as its twenty-fifth anniversary issue, carrying a history of the magazine's founding from CTW. In October 2023 it launched the MCV/Develop Podcast, whose first guest was its founder Stuart Dinsey, discussing his beginnings as a CTW reporter in the 1980s, establishing MCV in the 1990s, competing with GamesIndustry.biz in the 2000s and joining Curve in the 2010s.

Reaching a twenty-fifth anniversary and a 992nd issue as a print trade magazine is, in the context of British games media, a considerable achievement. Most consumer games magazines of 1998 have closed, and most trade titles have become websites only. MCV/Develop maintains a monthly print and digital edition, distributed free to qualifying industry readers through its website, alongside daily online news at mcvuk.com.

Website and digital presence

The magazine's website, mcvuk.com, publishes business and development news daily, organised across publishing, retail, development, people, media and public relations and events, and carries the digital editions of the monthly magazine. Academic historians of the British games industry, writing on the period from 1978 onwards, have relied heavily on MCV for the years from 1998 to 2017 alongside Develop for 1996 to 2017, precisely because a weekly trade title recorded company formations, closures, deals and appointments that no other source systematically preserved.

That archival function is now a stated part of the title's value. The Video Game History Foundation's collection, and the magazine's own anniversary retrospectives, treat MCV's back issues as a primary source for the commercial history of British games, from the PlayStation era through mobile and digital distribution to the modern studio landscape.

Place in British games media

In a directory of British magazines MCV belongs with the trade press rather than with the famous consumer games titles such as Edge, Computer and Video Games or Retro Gamer, and its profile should be read on those terms. Its influence is not measured in newsstand sales to players but in its quarter-century as the shared business record of an industry that grew, during its lifetime, from a British cottage sector into one of the country's largest creative industries.

Its survival through five owners, the absorption of Develop and Esports Pro, a move from weekly to monthly publication and a rebrand to MCV/Develop, while retaining print, a daily website, an awards programme and a podcast, makes it one of the most durable British specialist titles of its generation. For anyone researching the business of games in Britain, it remains, as it has been since September 1998, the first place to look.