MobyGames Professional lets uncredited developers claim their work

Atari-owned MobyGames has rolled out MobyGames Professional, a paid tier designed for game industry workers that launches in full in autumn after a beta period. The service addresses a long-standing problem in the gaming industry: developers and artists who contributed to games but were never credited in the final product.

The platform's core feature allows users to claim their work through a claim page button that associates their account with public-facing profile pages on MobyGames. "Developers, or anybody who is working in the industry who has game credits, have had those public-facing profile pages for a very long time," says Reece Denzel, product manager at MobyGames. "There's now a claim page button, which allows for the association of that user's account to the actual public-facing page."

Denzel emphasizes that claiming a page does not grant users the ability to edit structural credit information. Instead, it lets developers add verified details about themselves that appear as coming from an authenticated source. Cases of people being omitted from game credits are well documented across the industry, making this functionality potentially valuable for workers seeking to build professional portfolios.

To prevent bad actors from claiming unearned credits, MobyGames implemented a two-part verification process. The first involves human-driven verification to confirm users' identities. The second maintains MobyGames' existing credit verification system, which has remained unchanged since Atari acquired the database in March 2022. The company uses credit rolls from game screenshots, official spreadsheets from publishers, and community contributions to populate and verify credits.

"The credits often come from things like screenshots from the credit roll after the game," Denzel explains. "Sometimes we'll have companies send us spreadsheets from a more official source, but a lot of it is community-sourced and community-verified." He describes the relationship as symbiotic, with a system maintained by the community for the community.

MobyGames Professional also includes portfolio features that let developers showcase their work alongside verified credits. Designers can post demo reels, screenshots, and detailed descriptions of their contributions, linking to coverage or personal websites. "They can also write much more lengthy and detailed descriptions of their work, posting links to coverage of their own work or to the writeups, things like their personal site or anywhere that they want to direct users," Denzel says.

The service incorporates job matching capabilities powered by MobyGames' database of industry positions scraped from multiple sources. The system matches job requirements against verified work history, genres, platforms, and titles in users' credit profiles. It can also surface colleagues from past studios and studios' support networks, potentially helping users find referrals or new opportunities.

Denzel notes that the recruitment side is still developing, with ongoing work behind the scenes with companies. Testing has included systems where applicants can apply for jobs directly through MobyGames or add their MobyGames ID to applications. "We see so many situations where there are thousands and thousands of applicants for individual jobs, and we hear this from studios all the time that if applicants have that verified work history, that's an immediate differentiator," he says.

MobyGames is also building analytics features, starting with job market insights. The platform is bundling salary ranges, geographic breakdowns of hiring for specific companies and roles, and information about company hiring patterns and layoffs. Denzel sees this data as a tool for transparency in an industry that typically keeps such information private.

"We want data to be accessible," Denzel says. "The preservation of information and transparency goes right along with that." He points to tracking hiring and layoff patterns as a way to hold companies accountable. "One of the big things that people are looking for in the games space in the future is a little bit more stability, and keeping people accountable goes hand in hand with that stability."

According to Denzel, signups to the platform have been strong, with thousands of developers already claiming their pages during the beta period.