Bringing a game to life is the effort of a big number of contributors, from the one with the smallest position to the director. Everybody has the same level of importance at least when we talk about credits, everyone deserves to be recognized for their work, however, a number of former Striking Distance employees have been completely cut out of The Callisto Protocol credits without a good reason.
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According to a report by Gamesindustry.biz, around 20 ex-employees were omitted including senior devs and key contributors. Pretty unfair, right? Five developers brought this issue to light, noting that a variety of departments were left off the game's credits.
"It sucks. I made a good amount of contribution and worked on it for [a length of time]. To just not be there at all is shitty."
Now, you must be wondering if any of the people involved left the studio on bad terms and that is precisely why is so surprising, no one had a bad experience there, actually, many of them had a history working with Striking Distance CEO Glen Schofield at his previous studio, Sledgehammer Games. - "I understand if a contractor does a small amount of work for a few months and is left off, but we're talking full-time employees with over a year invested in the title, and had a hand in significant parts of the product," one developer says. "That's where the surprise has come from for a lot of us."
Things don’t stop here, what caught their attention was that some senior developers, leads, and directors who made significant contributions were included in the credits as "additional" help in their departments, and some others were grouped in a "Miscellaneous" category.
"I understand if a contractor does a small amount of work for a few months and is left off, but we're talking full-time employees with over a year invested in the title, and had a hand in significant parts of the product," one developer says. "That's where the surprise has come from for a lot of us."
Do you know?: The Callisto Protocol: several players want to request a refund for this reason
Unfair
Certainly, the way Striking Distance doled out credits is weird… Even more, if we consider that the game’s development had several cases of crunch with long working hours. If you weren’t aware Schofield was heavily criticized for posting on social media about how proud he was that the team was working 12-15 hour days, 6 or 7 days a week, despite exhaustion and even COVID.
"Designers I know were working 10 hours a day just in meetings, then they had to crunch just to basically do the work they had to do."
As we said before, most of the people omitted are now working for other studios and even though they didn’t leave on bad terms, for some it feels like a punishment for leaving.
"I think the Sledgehammer guys like loyalty, and they can be punitive if they detect a lack of it… [The credits omission] felt like an obvious F-U to those who were left out. Somebody wanted to send a message, and the message was, 'Next time have a bit more loyalty to us.'"
Striking Distance has not pronounced themselves about the issue, I guess we will have to wait longer for answers.
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