This is a new story, in that there is a new story today about it, but this is also a very old story, in that the same shit has been happening in video games for as long as there have been video games.
That story is crediting. Or, to be clear, the lack of proper crediting. The issue is back in the headlines today after staffers at Ridgeline Games, who worked on Battlefield 6 in some cases for years, found that they had either been shuffled to the very end of the game's credits (in a 'special thanks' section) or had been left off entirely.
Like I said, this is not a new problem; I wrote about it in 2021, with the headline 'Everyone Who Worked On A Game Should Be In The Credits', followed by 'I am once again asking you to respect people's time and work', which pretty much sums up the whole deal. And yet here I am again, writing about it in 2025, saying the exact same thing.
A game's credits should be a comprehensive list of everyone who worked on the game. Everyone. It doesn't matter if they worked on it for five minutes or five years, if they contributed to the game, or to the businesses making the game, they need to be in there. The fact workers are continually left off credits, whether it be for petty political reasons, even pettier "well they didn't really work on it" reasons or even just administrative oversight, is inexcusable.
You can't say crediting everyone is "too hard" when you have made a video game, a task that is infinitely harder than writing down everyone who worked on it. You can't say anyone from an external provider being left off was a case of them not really developing the game when they worked on the game, doing something the core team either didn't have the time or experience to do. And leaving people off because they left the team before the game shipped, or in Ridgeline's case above were shut down before Battlefield 6 was released, is the most teen drama shit imaginable.
And that’s just touching on the credits themselves, that form part of the shipped game, not the broader issues of how studios use crediting as a means of coercing people–whether that be to reward or punish workers–as detailed in Forest Lassman's 2020 story about the practice.
It shouldn't matter if someone applied the final polish or were there at the "ideas on a napkin" stage, put them in the credits. To not do so, for whatever reason, makes you look like an asshole.
