Move Street Cricket has made its way onto store shelves rather quietly, and it seems that with equal stealth, developer Trine Games has left out several former employees who worked on the game from its credits.
Former Trine employee Divyendra Singh Rathore made a post on the NASSCOM Gaming Forum on Facebook stating that he and atleast five other former colleagues, who had worked on Move Street Cricket, were left out from the game’s credits. Rathore further added that on contacting Trine about this omission, the game’s associate producer Anuj Sahani confirmed that his name was indeed “dropped out” and that it wasn’t an oversight.
According to Rathore, even though he had left Trine before the game was completed, a lot of his work on it made it into the final product, “down to minor things such as the names of players and mini game mode names (which were explicitly tagged as WIP and were meant to be changed later, but apparently weren’t).”
On contacting Trine Games for an official response, CEO Sangam Gupta told IVG,” (I) have asked my HR about the dates during which the employees left. We will shortly provide a full statement to you on that.”
He added, “To me, it’s one of those things where something big comes out and the credit hunger prevails. (These) guys claim they did so much and leave the company months before release, causing the game to get delayed by several months and costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. And yet they want to claim credit for the work.”
This incident is startlingly similar to the events at L.A. Noire’s Aussie developer Team Bondi, where there was an outcry from former employees who were left out from the game’s credits. The studio was forced to wind up operations soon after, amidst reports of harsh working conditions and unpaid wages.
Update: We’ve received a more detailed statement from Trine CEO Sangam Gupta, and here are some excerpts from it.
“All these guys are clearly aware of our company policies – you work on the game till the end, and you get credit for it. You abandon ship, you won’t. The rest of the team, which spent hundreds of crunch hours in the end to make the game a reality are the ones which deserve the true credit.
As far as Mr Divyendra Rathore is concerned, he worked on the project for two months in the very early stages, before the production even started. He left the company in January 2011. None of his work made it into the game, and it would have been unfair to the team and the company to list him as a “Games Designer” when he did not do anything towards the project. The team members were against his name being in.
Ankur Agarwal and Vibhash Joshi were well aware of the fact that their names won’t be in the credits. They left the project way before Alpha and their work was entirely re-written by the new programmers. The only error on our side was not including Shray Khanna, which was omitted by mistake. We will add his name in the forthcoming patch, which comes out in a few weeks.
It’s shit like this that is plaguing the industry. Everyone just complains about how shitty our games are and why the Indian games industry doesn’t progress. We didn’t enter this business to make money, but to make good games and build up the Indian games industry’s standard. We brought technologies like Unreal Engine 3 , and Playstation 3 and Wii development to India. We have over nine games available globally, something none of my competition can match or accomplish in the next three years. Our company is run by actual gamers.
Not showing up to work on time, taking unplanned leaves, complaining during crunch hours, ignoring phone calls from the company during milestone submission days and ultimately delaying the game and then complaining about salaries being delayed is unfair to the company. We rely on publishers to pay us, and they would only do so when the builds are hitting on time.
Leaving the company for better pay somewhere else, leaving your entire team in misery, delaying the game and still claiming credit for it is absolute nonsense.”
Gupta added further in a separate email, “We’ve reviewed the credits that made it to the final game and there are several guys who aren’t at Trine anymore (left over six months ago) and their names are still there in the credits. We have given proper credits to all the personnel involved whose work made it into the game. The allegations of Mr Rathore are completely absurd.”
Move Street Cricket is out now for Rs 1,499 on Blu-ray and Rs 1,099 on the Playstation Store. Check back soon for our review.