Hunting for the staff credits in 2025’s top video games

From Clair Obscur to Xenoblade, everyone's got a different approach to how they show who made their game. PLUS: There's always the Fortnite approach.

Players who boot up the hit March 2025 co-op action-adventure game Split Fiction will have no trouble figuring out the names of the people who made it.

On the game’s main menu, below “Play Local,” “Play Online” and “Options” is a clickable item labeled “Credits.”

Clicking that unfurls a list of names and titles. These are the people responsible for what we’re playing.

Anyone who wants to see a similarly detailed list of names for the people who made May 2025’s Doom: The Dark Ages will have to take one extra step after loading that game. Select “extras” from the main menu, and then, from there, an option for “credits.”

If, perhaps, you’d like to know who worked on last fall’s Call of Duty Black Ops 6, that one’s a little tougher:

1. Boot up the Call of Duty launcher app

2. Select Black Ops 6 from within the app

3. Press the menu button

4. Switch over the “settings” sub-menu

5. Scroll down to “Account & Network,” and click on that

6. Scroll down through the next menu… past the game’s online settings, past the profanity filter and a toggle for “dismemberment & gore effects.” – Keep going! – Scroll past three clickable user agreements and you’ll reach a clickable “credits” option

7. The credits will play, first showing the logos of nine development studios, and then hundreds of names of people who worked on the game

Completely intuitive, right?

I recently conducted a simple experiment: Try to find the credits in major video games.

I mostly looked at big game releases in 2025 (and some from late 2024), and I checked how the 10 best-reviewed games of the year, handle staff credits.

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The only consistency I found was inconsistency.

Some variations appeared to be contingent on who was publishing the game. I’d learn from some developers that it was a personal choice.

There are also some… quirks?…to how developers are credited in ongoing live service games, as you’ll see.

“It goes to show how far we have to go as an industry that we don’t have any standardization,” one veteran developer noted to me, as we chatted about this topic. They mentioned how visible and predictable credits are in movies. We all know where to expect to see those when watching a film. Not so with a game.

Below, I’ll share the results of what I found—as well as what the lead creators of two of 2025’s best games, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Despelote, told me about how they handled credits in their games.

But, first, I can’t resist sharing what I believe is the greatest patch note of all time regarding the developer credits in a video game. It’s from Nintendo…