TIGSource Forums

Today the game I worked on for over a year just came out.

It's my first 3D game from a big name studio so I'm excited to see it on the store, excited to see my name in the credits. I download it, play through the tutorial and finally hit the settings button and fire up the credits . . .

Lead Programmer
. . .

Programmers
. . .

. . .

Wait a second.. I don't see my name? I must have missed it so I exit and start the credits over again.. nope it's not there. They snubbed me.

Now the problem is I quit this job about 6 months ago, so maybe it's their policy to only give credit to current employees? When I left, the game was just starting QA so I feel like I worked on the game to completion.. Yes, there were a few things polished up, but the actual GAME is just as I had left it.. I put in a year of my life on this damn thing so don't I deserve my name somewhere in the credits?

Well, contact the com+any that made the game?
And what's the game, so we can start a holy crusade?

The game is Zombiewood (https://itunes.apple.com/app/zombiewood/id467452023).

It's one of those good for nothing, abhorrent, scum-of-the-earth freemium games, but god dammit I'm still proud of the technical work I did!

I think I read something about that (on tigsource or somewhere else...?) that it was customary in big studios to remove one's name after leaving the company. As strange as it is.

The bigger studios I've worked at are the same, you only get your name in the credits if you were still employed there when the game shipped.

Companies are evil.  :concerned:

What a terrible practice.. BUT I wouldn't expect anything more from the industry. Oh well.

That's a shame, sorry to hear it.

no one reads credits except the people on them anyways

Well then I guess as the target audience for the credits OP has a right to complain.  :biglaff:

Just to provide a counterexample, I read credits fairly often, usually in the interest of either seeing the name of someone I know, or finding out how many people worked on something. Not everyone finds them useless or uninteresting.

like I said. no one.

thats poopies, well, i guess you got paid for it. time to go indie and put your name on every single screen in the game.

That is pretty retarded how this happens, but why wouldn't you stay till the end anyway? At least in this case it was only an iphone game anyway, and not something cool like Halo 4.

i met the directors of major motion picture "paranorman" and read the credits intently and asked them about specific people who did wallah

as for video games? those people are no more than insects, rats, or perhaps a small dog at best. for sure, video game programmers are lower than level 10.

You could always pull the same trick as Atari programmers in the 80s - hide your initials in the game as an easter egg before you leave.

when you go to italy, you don't complain about the pasta eh

you could consider also drawing a massive hairy cartoon dick in the men's bathroom

Genitals are the initials of the tell-all show-all society of the 21st century.

True, it isn't an amazing AAA console game, but anything you put a lot of time and effort into you'd want to see a little credit for your work. I decided not to stay for personal reasons, the job was awful and I made barely enough to survive in NYC.. Yes I am happy I quit, but I still wanted to get a little credit for all the work I put into it, I think that's reasonable.


When I first got a job at Gameloft I had never heard the word freemium, 6 months later the first game I worked on gets canned and we get pulled into a room saying the stockholders decided our company wants to go in another direction.. I got deported to Italy.

*goes to credits in the game*

"hey ma look my name is in this game are you proud of me yet"

*mother takes a picture and posts it to her wall on Facebook*

*3 people like this*

ah memories

Oh my. I was just talking with one of the other developers of that game about 3 minutes ago. How awkward.

It sucks, but I think credit's a little overrated anyway. You don't really get into many paid jobs expecting to have credit. You can pretty much convince most people who deserve to know that you worked on it, via interviews or whatever. I've come to accept that it's what comes with working in bigger studios.

No one reads them, but people do reference them to find out who worked on X or confirm that person Y actually did work on game Z. Games are kind of peculiar in how credits aren't looked at much, but various other artforms (including visual novels, which may or may not count as games) have people being interested in people working on the thing, ranging from important roles as 'director' to more trivial things like 'who did the key animation in that one awesome fight scene'.

But yes, credits for technical people are hardly ever looked at, but they still serve as proof you worked on something.

I worked on 3 games at EA and I'm not credited in any of them.

it sounds to me like you're lying about working on those games

Yah probably.

Gameloft is one of those soulless "Clone every popular game down to the last detail" sweatshop game companies, anyway.  Hopefully it looks good on your resume. :p

Well big surprise.
It's not just game companies, but companies in general tend to optimize the ratio of What they gain divided to what you gain.
They would work you out to death and with no salary if they could get away with that.
You need to understand that your coworkers and your boss are not your friends.

A good deal of high tech, especially gaming companies actually don't do that. Maybe the ones who try to sell games because they make the most money, but any company built on passion for something are usually a hell lot nicer on their employees.

If think if EA could replace all programmers, designers and artists with chimps or robots that require no pay nor credit space they probably would. Manpower is so over-rated.

Game jam - In 2035, one of EA's game-dev robots independently develops sentience/self-awareness and decides to make an indie game. What kind of game does a sad robot make?

Oh HELL yeah. somebody make that  :laughter:

Isn't this a game development forum? I think YOU should go make it. :eyebrows:

it would ruin your future job opportunities once they find it and see your name on it, and if you do get hired, prepare to get treated somewhere between dung and the dry white stuff that forms on the edge of your mouth when you're super thirsty

them bosses

Depends what you mean by nicer.
If you mean trying to give emplpoyees gifts, make fun events and pretend they work in a really good place then yea.
But usually companies want the best of their share holders, not the best of their employees.

...because shareholders don't like it when game companies credit the people that worked on the game? :droop:

If the information provided in this thread is correct, it's an incentive for employees to stick to the end of a project despite working conditions being shit. So no, shareholders would not like that.

But aren't huge parts of a game development team often let go nearing the end of the development cycle before the product is finalized? It's my understanding that the size of the programming team will for example shrink as it gets closer to beta status, as it's more a matter of generating content at that point, and only a small programming team is kept on hand for whatever stuff pops up? But maybe you're just talking about people that leave on their own accord, like the OP?

Yeah, shareholders don't really like employees being treated like shit. Good investors look into things like that. Most of the time, the senior management are the only shareholders too. Game development is all creative work, right down from databases to project management; employee morale is your biggest asset.

If anything, leaving people out of credits is more to appease the ones who still stick around or encourage them to stick around until the project is finished. Especially with art or code, it's hard to just have someone fill in for someone else… if people leave in the middle, it sets things back a few steps.

Well you see, when they say software engineers, they lie a bit.
An engineer is designing the solution, he is the architect. A programmer does that as well, but on the other hand a programmer is also the hard labor worker.

Programming requiring a lot of "dirty work" makes programmers replaceable.
Not only that, but writing readable and maintainable code is not necessary to implement features.

Companies want their programmers to THINK they have good conditions, they give them just a bit above average to make them think they have a really good job, but they also keep them under constant stress.

Most people in the hi tech replace work places every 2 or so years. There is no job security in software engineering.

The shareholders want their workers to be happy as long as it serves their purpose, they could lay off and rehire people for the tinniest reasons.

That being said, I was told by some guy who works at a big AAA studio that they have a very defined rules for that, and that every person who stays more than 3 months get credited.
Not only that, he said that if you don't get credit it's probably because someone forgot to put you in the list and you didn't tell them to put you there.
i.e. it's more a human error rather than malicious or a policy.

im gun write ten paragraphs of boring but tldr its human error

lol. I WOULD, but I'm neck deep in smthing else  :tired: