Credit. When people work on something, it’s only right to expect those people get credit. Unfortunately, the videogame industry is a wasteland of sleaze, and companies seem to think credit is optional.
XSEED caused a fuss last year by claiming it was policy not to credit workers who have left the company, even if their work is part of the game. While the studio’s tone deaf nonsense turned heads, it’s far from the only company that doesn’t give proper acknowledgement.
Withholding credit is another example of how the game industry mistreats people simply because it can get away with it. It’s unfair leverage to make an unrepresented workforce compliant. Crediting standards need to be enforced, because non-negotiable enforcement is all the game industry seems to respect.
Tommy Wiseau is the greatest director
2009? This issue has been called out since the 70s. Atari lost it’s best developers because they refused to credit them properly.
Remember when Konami said Kojima never worked on MGSV?
Blizzard want’s to take your credits away in Warcraft 3 Reforged maps, don’t make anything for Blizzard.
Like how Jason Derulo says his name at the beginning of every song so you know who’s singing it?
Just wanted to reiterate, here’s to you Artem Mironovsky, you absolute legend.
Let’s not forget the first ever Easter egg was just someone wanting to get credits for their work.
It was a hard battle to ever have a credit sequence.
I actually left a project a while back that flat out said to my face “it doesn’t say anywhere in your contract that we have to credit you if you leave” – over me unfollowing them on twitter, no less
i convinced them to take my shit out of the game but i’m still pissed about it
XSEED really got screwed in general. The whole history of the western localization of Trails in the Sky is pretty epic. That first Trails in the Sky game hooked me hard. It was the best JRPG I’d played in almost a decade. Then I found out about how rough the translation was. The XSEED team was really only two or three people. They had about 1 million lines of dialogue to translate into English. That’s not an exaggeration, the first game was over a million lines of dialogue. One of them suffered a nervous breakdown. They almost scrapped the whole project. They pulled it out in the 11th hour.
XSEED went on to do Trails in the Sky 2&3, and Trails in of Cold Steel 1&2. All games I absolutely love. Seriously, if you like JRPGs you have to give the Trails series a play. For some reason Falcom decided to hand Cold Steel 3 to a different team and that’s kind of a shitty thing to do considering XSEED did wonderful work on everything Falcom gave them. They also did the Ys series. I just hope the new localization team, NIS, does justice for Cold Steel 3. I really have just got to know how that series ends.
Ahhh, Xseed. I remember them publishing Ju-On: The Grudge for Wii in 2009 lol.
Instead of a credit, here’s a tv that looks like an apple.
Nice try Jim, you almost fooled me that Todd didn’t do all those Elder Scrolls by himself.
Honestly, Jim Sterling in Mississippi made no sense to me. Ever.
Hearing this about Trails of Cold Steel pisses me off.
Im kinda sad the first ever time Jim was exposed to the wonderful Trails series is with the shameful display here instead of their biblical efforts in translating the Trails in The Sky games, whats with it over million of words and all
A Story From Early Film Era: Back during the silence era and, if I remember right for a while after, it was common practice for film studios to forbid star actors/actresses from being credited by name for the films they did. Instead, they would be marketed under stock names. Studios wanted to be able to see the brand of star actors without having them have any personal cache with which to bargain with in contract negotiations. Its worth noting that once this practice ended, some stars eventually built up enough money and cache to literally start their own studios (United Artists, for example). This is the reason that film industry unions required credit at the end of the film. The industry itself had/has a long history of using the fact that film is a collaborative medium in which no one individual is entirely responsible for the end product as a tool to undermine to interests of workers by virtue of pretending they don’t exist. The video game industry, in keeping with the trend of embracing all the worst practices of the film industry because for some reason nobody in government seems to want to treat them like an industry, systematically works to obscure the value that those who work on a game bring to a project. Between what was discussed in this video and the way in which voice actors routinely get screwed over, I feel it is pretty clear that unless serious steps are taken to force studios and publishers to acknowledge the work put into the products they sell, they will continue to leverage the relative invisibility of their workers against them.
This all leads right back to the same issue we’ve talked about before
UNIONIZE THE GAME INDUSTRY