It's been a hot minute since I've paid any kind of attention to some industry drama and good golly has a sort of big one managed to fall in front of me.
Bayonetta is a sort of niche series I think but she IS featured in Smash so I assume most people know about her but just in case you live under a rock being stored in a nuclear bunkers panic room Bayonetta is game series about a freakishly tall women fighting angels or something. Granted I've only played the first game and even that was way back when it first came out but I'm pretty sure its something to that effect. It's basically Devil May Cry but with a freakishly tall and lanky lady instead of a freakishly handsome and funny dude.
On Sunday I came across a series of videos from the voice actor for Bayonetta, Hellena Taylor, talking through sobs and tears about how shes SO well educated and SO well versed in her field and was somehow only offered a total of $4000 to voice the entire game. Not only this, but as a result of her shitty offer she was calling upon fans of the Bayonetta series to boycott the release of the game and not buy it. Also at this point I think news came out that by not taking the offer she was dropped from the series and a new woman, Jennifer Hale, has now taken up the role for the third game. ALSO ALSO Hideki Kamiya, one of the big boys over at Platinum Games, the developer of Bayonetta, went on an all caps tirade about how shes lying and the offer was closer to $150,000 before his account got deleted, seemingly by his own volition but I have no idea whats going on with him.
So at this point I was sort of torn. It's a well known thing that voice actors are underpaid in a lot of cases and $4000 to do all the voice work for the 3rd game in a niche yet quite succesful franchise of character action games seems insanely low even by shitty game industry standards. But something felt off about Taylor's videos. The chest beating regarding her education and experience, the call for a boycott and the crying just gave her videos a weird stank that had me siding with Platinum Games instead of her despite her shitty situation.
Now I'm not going to go down the stupid Twitter argument route of "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER DEVS BEING PAID FOR THEIR WORK" because, like most people are eager to point out, the other developers of the game are probably salaried or have some kind of other contract going on and have already made their money or have agreements about their money with the company. But put the money aside for a second. Imagine you are a programmer, a level designer, sound engineer, 3D or 2D artist or one of the myriad other jobs required for a game to get made. You've spent YEARS of your life putting this thing together, working hard, probably doing a fair bit of overtime and maybe even making some personal sacrifice to try and ensure that the fans of this game get an experience that they enjoy and that you can be proud of. Then, some suit in your company, completely devoid and separate from your work goes and makes a bad decision and makes ONE member of the team a crappy offer suddenly all the work you did for all those years is getting hate thrown at it and potentially thrown to the wayside just because of that. You'd feel like complete shit. If I was, for example, Takaaki Yamaguchi (the lead Animator according to Bayonetta 2s credits, assuming its still him) and I heard that you were trying to sabotage years of my animation work because some businessman in the company offered you a shitty contract, I would want to find you and smash a glass bottle right across your stupid fucking head. Takaaki is probably a bit more level headed than that, but the rage I would feel over even the SUGGESTION of something like that would be incredible.
BUT THEN I load up Twitter this morning and I find that the plot had thickened.
Turns out that, if true, the actual offer for Hellena Taylor's voice over was $4000 per session in the booth (which according to the same Twitter user is 4 hours) and that she would be paid that 4 or 5 times. That's considerably more money than what she was claiming to be the case in her original videos. This still seems sort of low, I guess, I am not entirely sure what is considered to be a "good wage" for video game voice work but its still significantly higher than what she originally suggested in her fishy as fuck run of videos on Twitter.
My inital theory on Sunday when discussing it with a friend of mine was that Bayonetta is just not a very voice heavy game. Most of it is high action with a couple of cutscenes here and there and even of those cutscenes, a percentage of those are going to be mostly unvoiced action scenes. Getting $4000 for 4 hours of work to get into a booth, say a few lines in an over the top British accent and then spend the rest of my work day going "HYA!" "HOO YA!" "TAKE THIS!" into a microphone seems like a pretty good fucking deal to me. Then again I guess I don't have the "pedigree" that Ms Taylor has now, do I?
If Taylor hadn't have made an attempt at emotional manipulation in that first run of videos my reaction would have been "wow, that sucks, I hope she can negotiate something better" and I would have moved on. But this has now EXPLODED into a big story with people potentially lying and parties skirting what can and cant be said thanks to NDAs and it's now something I'll be watching quite closely.
Oh and by the way, I'm going to go play Bayo 2 right now and I'll pick up Bayo 3 on launch, fuck you and fuck your tears, Hellena
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