Zerply shuts down tomorrow. Sixteen years of VFX credits and reels, gone, and no one site replaces what it did — which makes the timing of the other thing happening this week hard to ignore. MobyGames, the games database Atari has owned since 2022, is opening up its credit records. Developers can claim their own page, verify who they are, and build a portfolio hanging off the credits the database already holds.
Including, and this is the part worth sitting with, credits they never received.
What the roll leaves out
Game credits are written by the employer, and they are written once. There is no appeal after ship. Every artist who has been in the industry more than a couple of years knows somebody who missed a roll: the contractor whose six-month stint ended in March on a game that shipped in November, the outsourcing house that got one line reading the vendor’s company name while eleven people inside it modelled half the props, the person who left badly and discovered what that costs when the credits went to cert.
Technical artists have a specific version of this problem. The role does not map cleanly onto a department, so it gets swept into whatever bucket the producer building the roll finds convenient — Additional Art, or Engineering, or a Special Thanks that reads as a favour rather than a job. I have looked at enough credit rolls to know the shape of the thing: the further your work sits from a named discipline, the vaguer your line.
MobyGames already allowed uncredited contributors to be added where their involvement could be independently verified. What the new tier changes is that there is now a direct route to it, attached to a verified identity, rather than a community submission from a stranger. The bar stays higher than for someone whose name is printed in the roll, which is correct and also means the people with the thinnest paper trail — the vendor artists, the short contracts — are still the ones who will struggle.
Two kinds of proof, kept apart
The design detail I like: the claim flow does not let you rewrite the structural credit data. A human process at MobyGames confirms you are the person you say you are. Corrections to the credits themselves — the misspelled surname, the wrong role — still go through the existing community verification the database has always used.
That split is doing real work. Identity and accuracy are different questions with different failure modes, and a system that lets a verified account edit the record it is verified against is a system that fills up with polite fiction within a year. Keeping the two apart is unglamorous and it is the reason this might survive contact with a hundred thousand users.
The portfolio side is where the value sits for anyone reading this. Claimed credits can carry screenshots, a reel, a description, links, and a note on what you specifically contributed. That last field is the one that matters. A line in a roll is a job title and a shipped product; it says nothing about whether you built the foliage system or dressed forty rooms with someone else’s kit. Employers searching the database can filter on that. Product manager Reece Denzel told GamesIndustry.biz at Gamescom that thousands of developers have already claimed pages.
The price
Moby Professional went into beta in June, with a 1.0 due this autumn. It costs $14.99 a month, or $11.99 a month billed annually, with a 45-day trial. The beta was free and was expected to run to the end of summer; I could not confirm whether the paid tier has switched on yet.
Fifteen dollars a month is not much against a games salary. It is quite a lot against no salary, which is the situation a meaningful slice of this audience is in — Ninja Theory closed this month with 268 more Xbox jobs, and that was one of several. The record of what you built is most valuable to you at exactly the moment you have least money, and a subscription reverses that. I do not think anyone at MobyGames set out to design it that way. Databases cost money to run, Atari is a public company, and the honest version of this is that nobody has worked out who pays for the industry’s memory.
What sits badly is the direction of travel. Zerply dies tomorrow. ArtStation and Sketchfab changed hands in August. The infrastructure holding the proof of an artist’s career keeps being something a company owns, and the companies keep changing their minds. A verified credit page is a good thing to have. It is worth knowing that it now lives behind a card on file, and worth exporting whatever else you have while the exporting still works.