Most publishers and developers ask potential employees to submit resumes that include credits for video games as validation of their work. However, approximately 130 Australian developers claim that publisher Rockstar and developer Team Bondi did not credit them on L.A. Noire, though some worked as long as four years on the project.
The video game industry in Australian is small, so not being recognized for contributing on a commercially and critically successful title such as L.A. Noire can be a severe undersight and impediment in seeking future employment.
Fighting for recognition, the group of snubbed developers have created lanoirecredits.com and convinced mobygamers.com, the video game equivalent to IMDB for the movie industry, to include them in their database, though many of them do not wish to be named in individual stories for fear that they would be blacklisted by other Australian developers and publishers.
This flies in the face of the unspoken rule that those who leave a company before a game's official release is generally left off the credits, despite the fact that the code those people have contributed to the game (say, for the physics engine or the graphics) are used in the final product.
Though some of the 130 developers admit that they were told that they wouldn't be credited unless they stayed at the company until the game shipped, they maintain that this is not an ethical practice in the first place. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) state guidelines that any contractor or employee who works at least 30 days on the production of a game should be credited.
Rockstar and Team Bondi has yet to respond to calls requesting comments.
[Source]
