In March 2022, Atari acquired the video game database MobyGames.
It was a surprise move for this latest iteration of the long-lived publisher, which has in the past few years put its focus on retro. At the time, CEO Wade Rosen highlighted MobyGames’ role in the “documentation, celebration, and preservation of video games”, and later said there were plans for the database.
Now, we have some idea of what those plans are. In June, MobyGames announced a new paid tier to its offering, geared towards industry professionals. MobyGames Professional is currently available in beta – with a 1.0 version set to launch in autumn – and it allows users to, among other things, claim video game credits, customise their personal portfolio, and track in-demand skills and salaries in their discipline.
In an interview at Gamescom, product manager Reece Denzel tells GamesIndustry.biz that signups to the platform have been “great”, adding that “thousands of developers” have claimed their pages on the service.
“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,” Denzel says. “There’s now a claim page button, which allows for the association of that user’s account to the actual public-facing page. It’s very important for us to note that that does not give them the ability to edit any of the structural information about things like their credits. What it does give them the opportunity to do is to go in and edit some details about themselves that are then listed as coming from the verified source of that developer.”
Cases of people being left off game credits are well documented, and the new function potentially allows users to claim titles for which they are otherwise uncredited. However, it could also potentially open up MobyGames to bad actors, who claim credit for games they never worked on. To stop that, the firm has rolled out a verification process.
“There’s two parts to that,” says Denzel. “One is making sure that people are who they say they are, and that’s a human-driven verification process that we run in the background. When it comes to making sure that credit history is reflected appropriately, the actual way that we do credits and credit verifications has not changed: It’s not changed since Atari has been involved, it’s not changed in a long time, and we have no plans to change that process.
“There are some times where we need to go back and make corrections, and it’s usually around cases where people might have names that are misspelled, or they go by a different name at some point. And those are things that we have processes to correct. But ultimately our guiding goal is that information that is on the site is as accurate as humanly possible, which is not necessarily always 100%, but it’s about as close to 100% as it can be.”
Community work
Much of the work on maintaining MobyGames’ database of games and developers is done by volunteers, or as Denzel puts it, “a very active contributor and approver community”.
“The credits often come from things like screenshots from the credit roll after the game,” he 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 calls it a symbiotic relationship: a system maintained by the community, for the community.
There’s also MobyRank, which allows users to see how popular certain genres or kinds of games are based on page views. But perhaps the most interesting new feature of MobyGames Professional is the ability for developers to create a portfolio page, where they can post about their own work.
“If they’re a designer, they want to post either demo reels or screenshots of their work and associate that with the games credits that they have,” Denzel says. “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. Our goal there is to connect the verified credit history through MobyGames with the ability for those individuals to promote their work.”
He gives the example of an employer discovering that a certain person was a lead designer on a specific game, and then being able to easily see other examples of their output via the designer’s portfolio and the MobyGames database.
Job listings
Alongside the games and people database, MobyGames also keeps a database of jobs in the industry pulled from “a variety of locations”, says Denzel.
“What that allows us to do is to associate those jobs with the studios in our database, and we can pull elements from those job postings or the ongoing projects from those studios,” he explains.
“We can match different elements of those to people who have MobyGames Professional accounts, because we know what the work history is, the genres, the platforms, the number of titles that they’ve worked on, everything in their credit details and their credit titles. We can serve them up a more personalised look at all the opportunities.”
The system can also highlight other people who have worked at the same studios as you in the past, or who have provided support for those studios, which could be useful for finding a point of contact or finding someone who can vouch for your skills. “Obviously games is a very social industry, where working with people and being able to vouch for people matters a lot,” says Denzel.
So far, most of the work on the recruitment side of MobyGames Professional has been focused on individual users, although the firm has also been working with “a lot of companies behind the scenes”. Denzel says they have been testing systems where people can apply for jobs through MobyGames itself or add their MobyGames ID to a job application.
“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,” says Denzel, adding that a MobyGames portfolio of verified work can help employers to “sort through and find the right people more quickly.”
Data mountain
When it comes to games data, MobyGames has an embarrassment of riches, and Denzel says the next stages will be providing more services in the way of analytics.
“Our first step in providing an analytics layer is with what’s going on in the job market,” he says. “This is something that we did a lot of activity on, looking at things like salary ranges or geographic breakdowns of the job market for certain companies that are hiring, or for certain types of roles. We’re bundling up a lot of that information right now, and we’ve been working with a few select partners to figure out how we can cut it and make it more available. We have a lot of information just about what’s going on in the industry, what companies are up to, hiring, layoffs, how that connects to new games coming out.”
“One of the big things that people are looking for in the games space in the future is a little bit more stability”
Denzel says this wealth of data can help provide some transparency in an industry that tends to keep such things away from watchful eyes when it can help it. “We want data to be accessible,” he says. “The preservation of information and transparency goes right along with that.” That includes things like tracking when a studio hired employees, how many people they hired, and when they were laid off.
“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. Keeping people accountable often just starts with knowing what has happened and being able to point to something and say: ‘Okay, wait a minute, companies are saying a lot of things, but let’s actually look to see what happened and so we can trace that back’.”
It will be clear in the data exactly which companies have a history of, say, mass hiring and firing. Having access to this kind of information will allow the community to push back, he says. “Or at least be aware of it, so that we can be better prepared as individuals.”