With less and less titles shipping as boxed-product and very few of those having anything approaching an instruction booklet crediting is almost dead already.
Some in-game credit screen buried in the options menu or after completing a 50+ hour campaign is about as un-readable as the end credits on a Netflix TV show.
The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as the same as a colleague who worked through the ship process. I'm not sure how it works in the production side of the film industry but I imagine it is not dissimilar.
You definitely did the right thing by getting out and looking after yourself and those around you. The industry has and is responding to the loss of good people due to burn-out, not at every developer but some of the most notorious have realized the level of churn hurts their ability to hire and retain the best. The more push-back there is against the onerous work practices the more quickly they will stop.
> The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as the same as a colleague who worked through the ship process.
There should be universally-agreed rules around how crediting works: how about a case where a noob who joined a month before shipping gets credit, but someone who slogged for 2 years but quit gets relegated to "Special Thanks" despite putting more effort. Does that seem fair to you?
To me no, it is not fair at all (although generally there is little to no hiring in the last few months before shipping).
From the game company perspective making the new employee feel good is better than making a former employee feel good.
What is interesting with games that are live for multiple years is how often should in-game credits be updated and how do you credit over time as people join and leave the product with differing amounts of tenure and influence.
But yes, universally agreed crediting rules would be wonderful. I don't see how the collective industry gets there outside of a union pushing for it.
This argument is unsympathetic to the millions of creative professionals who deserve credit for their work. It's about a lot more than just a list of names.
Authors get credit for their books. Everyone who works on a film gets credit for their contribution. This goes into your CV, resume, IMDB, whatever. It's important.
I understand but I don't see the industry going back to boxes 30 page with instruction books.
Having an industry approved crediting scheme would be wonderful but for the most part the only people viewing it is going to be people on the credits. No games industry recruiter looks at a resume and verify names against the in-game credits (or even IMDB) - they will check against references and people they know that you may have worked with. Same as every other job application.
Film may be the last industry where everyone involved still gets credited. TV credits are basically unreadable, streaming music credits only cover the artist, books only list the author.
I'm not arguing against credits, just that they are not important outside of being a cool 'thank you'.
It's not just about having a name listed in an instruction book or in an end roll, and never has been. You know where most TV/film credits are actually seen? On IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and other sites. I can go look up my cousin who works in the film industry and see every film he's ever worked on: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4253724/ That's the primary way that film credits are consumed, and it would be great if we had something similar in our industry (the closest we get is a list of open source contributions e.g. on your GitHub profile). But, for example, I've contributed code to Google Cloud Platform, Android, and the Google Search app, but you'd never know it unless you worked at Google and looked through the monorepo very closely. The closest I can get would be to write my own credits page, but how would anyone verify that?
So it's fine if you don't care, but plenty of other people do care about getting credit for their work, and to them it is quite important. This describes most people in many industries. So yeah, it is important.
This is very specific to gaming though. The vast majority of people are never credited for anything. If that's the best justification for a union then it's not gonna happen.
> I'm not sure how it works in the production side of the film industry but I imagine it is not dissimilar.
I don't know about films, but credits on TV shows apparently work more like lifetime achievement awards than like a list of who worked on what. Everyone touches a lot of different things, your total contributions are tracked informally, and when they exceed a certain amount you get an episode credit. You need to have touched the episode, but you might have done much less work on that particular episode than a dozen uncredited people.
Source: Mark Rosewater's writing about his time on Roseanne.
Yeah except I knew many people in the industry who would cross reference mobygames when a resume came in and not all of our hires were with direct references.
Also this was a boxed retail title with no dlc so the credit list was pretty fixed.
I'm out of the industry now with no plans to ever return but the whole process just seemed pretty and spiteful. We worked just as hard during those 3 years as I did shipping other titles before that so I don't really buy that leaving early changes the title on which you worked as.
The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as the same as a colleague who worked through the ship process. I'm not sure how it works in the production side of the film industry but I imagine it is not dissimilar.
You definitely did the right thing by getting out and looking after yourself and those around you. The industry has and is responding to the loss of good people due to burn-out, not at every developer but some of the most notorious have realized the level of churn hurts their ability to hire and retain the best. The more push-back there is against the onerous work practices the more quickly they will stop.