Forums > News > New Metric: Number of People Credited
MobyReed (325) on 2/23/2020 11:14 PM · Permalink · Report
A new metric has been added to credit listings so you can get an exact count of how many people were credited on any particular release!
There are some fun and interesting ways to use this. For example, you can see how credits have grown between sequels:
Grand Theft Auto = 86 developers
Grand Theft Auto II = 158 developers
Grand Theft Auto III = 185 developers
Grand Theft Auto IV = 1,337 developers
Grand Theft Auto V = 3,692 developers
Note: In cases where credits include thanks, the numbers are shown separately. This is a useful distinction, especially for games that have backers which can easily exceed the number of developers. e.g., FTL: Faster Than Light has 1,053 credits, 1,046 of which are backers/thanks.
Tracy Poff (2094) on 2/24/2020 12:16 AM · Permalink · Report
For those regulars who might be curious about the details, these numbers are counts of unique developers--unique by developer ID, or by the entered text for entities, and the separated 'thanks' are according to the credit category, so if the numbers don't seem right, check if a correction is in order!
Tracy Poff (2094) on 2/28/2020 5:27 AM · Permalink · Report
If they're not in the thanks category, they're counted as developers, yes. And of course it wouldn't be sensible to exclude the 'other' category, which (I presume) more often contains developer-type credits than thanks-type credits.
However, wouldn't production babies be more suitable to the special thanks category, anyway? Our standards say to include credits listed as "In memory of" and "Dedicated to", and surely production babies credits are more like 'dedicated to' than 'unspecified development role'.
Patrick Bregger (301035) on 2/29/2020 8:11 AM · Permalink · Report
Yes, but I never saw more than maybe ten developer babies at once, so that's not a big factor. On the other hand there are many special thanks sections which list developers which left the company before completion or outside contributors. In conclusion, of course this number can never be accurate, but it is still a cool addition.
MAT (240968) on 3/2/2020 11:12 AM · edited · Permalink · Report
You were probably checking very old games with small number of developers.
But if you check credits for newer games like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey you will see that production babies section isn't around 10 but closer to a 100.
Any AAA title that includes those, and many do outside of Special Thanks, usually have 50-100 such names. And these appear across several projects, and not just on projects during which those babies were born. It's like they copy-paste that stuff across 5 years of projects, lol.
Sciere (930490) on 2/24/2020 10:21 AM · Permalink · Report
If anyone is curious: as far as I know, Red Dead Redemption II has the largest amount of people credited (7323).
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 2/24/2020 2:01 PM · Permalink · Report
Over an eight year period developing for Rockstar, that looks like... god, they burned out nearly a thousand people annually. 2.5 devs daily for eight years!
Patrick Bregger (301035) on 2/26/2020 4:52 PM · edited · Permalink · Report
World of WarCraft: Battle for Azeroth has more with thanks excluded. To be fair, there is the Blizzard Development Family role which may or not be a thanks category. And probably 30% is Customer Service.
Cavalary (11445) on 2/25/2020 1:53 AM · Permalink · Report
Indeed. Nice little thing. Very simple programming-wise, but handy, at least as trivia. (Well, assuming the credits are correct at least. The matter of XSEED only crediting devs that still work there when it's all done was recently brought up again on another forum, for example.)
Patrick Bregger (301035) on 2/26/2020 4:54 PM · Permalink · Report
...which is unfortunately a industry standard. Does not make it better, of course.
Tracy Poff (2094) on 2/29/2020 6:49 AM · Permalink · Report
Yeah, I can tweak that next time I'm working on this stuff.
Daniel Saner (3503) on 8/22/2020 2:34 PM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start MobyReed wrote--]Grand Theft Auto IV = 1,337 developers[/Q --end MobyReed wrote--]
Finally, it pays off that Rockstar put such extra attention on their hiring and firing during GTA IV's development in order to reach a credit count of exactly 1337 individuals. I bet they were wondering if anyone ever notices.
MAT (240968) on 9/14/2020 11:50 PM · edited · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Daniel Saner wrote--] Finally, it pays off that Rockstar put such extra attention on their hiring and firing during GTA IV's development in order to reach a credit count of exactly 1337 individuals. I bet they were wondering if anyone ever notices. [/Q --end Daniel Saner wrote--]
This only applies to PS3 credits. Xbox shows 1320, and PC shows staggering 2743 devs. So if someone else says that developing games for PS3 was complicated, you just need to point that they needed more than twice the amount of people to make the same game for PC :D
