The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has announced the first major update to its ‘game credit policy’ guide for a decade, hoping to improve credit standards in the video game industry.
Its ‘Game Credits Special Interest Group’ (SIG) recognizes inconsistencies across the industry – not just from game to game, but within the same companies. According to the SIG, employees can often be “mislabeled, unlabeled, or omitted” credits even if they “spent years of their lives” bringing the game to life, and this can affect “career and award” chances.
The Credits, Engineering and Accessibility SIGs are also working on an open source tool for Unity and Unreal developers, which will allow users to create “easy-to-update user interface and text scrolling credits” that adapt to the needs of teams. You can find out more here.
These efforts are supported by survey results, as reported by the IGDA Analytics SIG:
“51.3% of respondents either “never”, “rarely” or “sometimes” receive formal praise for their efforts. Additionally, 83.1% of respondents indicated “not sure” or “no” when asked if their employer or client had loans for the policy game in force.”
The second version of IGDA’s credit policy is already being drafted and will be revised based on feedback received at the recent GDC roundtable. IGDA also launched a new hashtag #FixGameCrediting help “focus the discussion” and bring the whole industry together.
“We hope these efforts enable and empower teams around the world to claim accurate, consistent and faithful credits, celebrating the contributions teams make to the games we all love.”
It follows a string of high-profile video game releases in recent years not to mention current and former team members.
