Atari has announced Moby Professional, which consists of both free and premium features designed for those working in the video game industry. Moby Professional is designed to assist with job seeking, business development, and networking. The MobyGames database now includes data on more than 350,000 games and add-ons, 1.3 million individuals, and 50,000 companies.
Over the past few years, game industry professionals have endured significant volatility, including layoffs, studio closures and consolidation, a sharp rise in freelance and contract work, and a job market where even experienced professionals struggle to understand where opportunities exist and how to reach them.
According to MobyGames in a press release, “The tools available to the games industry professionals haven’t kept up. Generic professional networks don’t cater to the nuances of working in gaming, and job boards don’t capture the network and personalized intelligence that actually drives how careers move in this industry.”
After watching incredibly talented people struggle to represent their career in spaces that don’t account for the wide variety of specialized roles and responsibilities or the significance of game credits, the team at MobyGames set out to build professional services geared towards individuals and organizations in the games industry.
“The past few years have been really hard for a lot of incredibly talented people in the games industry. They’ve had to fight an uphill battle to get noticed in a difficult hiring environment. MobyGames has spent 25 years building a database of what they’ve accomplished and who they’ve worked with. Helping them use it more directly for jobs, for visibility, for their own careers, feels like a natural next step for growing the Moby platform,” said Reece Denzel, product manager at Atari, in the same press release.
The new free tier of Moby Professional includes features that allow developers to take control of their own presence on MobyGames. By creating a free account and verifying their identity, professionals can claim their profile page and reap the benefits of a database that has already aggregated and verified their professional credits.
With a free account professionals can now:
- Claim their developer profile
- Add more detail to individual credits
- Add more information regarding their role and the companies they have worked for
- Manage privacy settings for your information
- More is planned for the future, which will incorporate community feedback from the beta
The premium Professional subscription aims to build on that foundation, adding news feeds and networking tools that let job seekers stay up to date on games, peers, and companies most relevant to them, and track their job market potential and opportunities. Pricing is expected at $14.99 USD a month, with potential early-access discounts for beta participants.
With a Moby Professional account, available for free during the beta period, users can now:
- Visualise their gaming network and connections
- See game launch and media coverage updates from their professional network
- Access personalized Job postings, insights and industry tracking, including recommendations, compensation ranges, connections working at target companies, and more
“Ask any games professional what platform they use to manage their career, and you’ll hear the same frustrations — existing solutions were not designed for this industry. MobyGames has documented game credits with more depth and accuracy than anyone else for decades. Combining that foundation with a purpose-built professional network was simply the obvious thing to do,” said Andreas Deptolla, president of Atari Europe, in the press release.
The MobyGames team worked with industry professionals as they conceived and built this first toolset, and they will actively solicit feedback from participants during the beta period, which is projected to run through the end of the Summer.
Atari acquired MobyGames in March 2022 with the goal of supporting the site’s mission to document, celebrate, and preserve vital information in its database. With support from Atari, MobyGames completed a comprehensive site upgrade which has enabled more rapid development and led to a significant increase in the volume and rate of both contributions and verification.