@jasonr86: She said the previous games were 4 sessions that lasted 4 hours each, presumably 3 would have been the same but i'm not sure.

I haven't watched all the trailers to Bayonetta 3 but I know it stars multiple Bayonettas which are probably all voiced by the same person so maybe she would have had to do more here.

While this is all speculation maybe that's part of the reason they went with Jennifer Hale. She's demonstrated she a lot of range which i'm not sure about with Hellena Taylor. (She may do, i'm not familiar with her work outside of Bayonetta)

This whole thing is a shitty situation, but I don't think it's worth killing a franchise over which is what a successful boycott (however mythical that is) would do.

@boozak:

Ok. Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t know personally what that would mean for her ability to work that week/month. On the face it seems reasonable, but I don’t know. For my job, I get around $1.5-$2k per week. Per hour it’s around $90. So by comparison, it seems reasonable to pay $4k for that work load. But there are likely variables I don’t know.

I guess personally, ultimately I’d want people to be paid what they are worth and as much as they need to live reasonably well. Whatever that number is for voice actors, that’s what I would want them to be paid.

Did Platinum lie about it? It seems very her word against theirs.

@shindig: Platinum hasn’t said much beyond Kamiya vaguely claiming that it isn’t true but they DID try to brush her not reprising the role as like scheduling or something such.

@jasonr86 said:

Depends on the going rate and expected hours. I earn a decent living, above the 'average' rate for somebody in my job position -- but I also have 30 years of I.T. experience, 10 of them in the very specific field I'm currently in. So, if somebody were to offer me the 'average' rate (which would still be a decent living), I'd say "thanks, but no thanks."

Now according to the people who say entertainers don't deserve a share of the success in the characters they bring to life, they would say what I'm doing is greed. But I would counter that my main purpose is to make sure I'm paid fairly for the work I do, for my own benefit, and the benefit of my family.

In this specific case, based on what Hayter has said, we're looking at 16 hours of recording time at the average rate. Not total dialogue -- recording time in the studio. Doing some quick google-fu, I couldn't find stats for games, but, I did find some references to ADR where you could average anywhere from 20-40 lines of finished dialogue in a one hour recording session. So, over 16 hours, assuming the top end of that estimate, Taylor could record 640 finished lines of dialogue. It's been a very long time since I've played Bayonetta 1 or 2, and I can't find a clean estimate of how much dialogue there actually is in the game -- but 640 lines seems rather small for the main protagonist in game with cutscenes.

And what Taylor is doing here is the pushing of the nuke button. No matter what happens from this point, very few people are going to hire her for a significant job. So whatever her feelings are, she feels strongly enough about it to basically scuttle her voice acting career, at least in video games, moving forward.

I'm not going to comment whether her behaviour was fully justified going nuclear. I wasn't in the room when it happened. I'm just pointing out that, when you dig through it all, there's certainly enough evidence to support that she was given a lowball offer, potentially an insultingly lowball offer.

In terms of Jennifer Hale and questions about budget -- we won't know until the game comes out, but I wonder if it will be a Kiefer Sutherland situation where, yes, they got a more notable actor -- but their rate was so high, they gave them very few lines to speak. One of the compelling features of Bayonetta's character is how snarky she is while interacting with her world as a whole. It'll be really disappointing if getting Jennifer Hale means we get nothing more than combat barks and the occasional one liner.

Or the other possibility is that they knew going in they didn't want Taylor - and lowballed her so Platinum could say she quit, expecting that she would stay quiet because she would want to continue working in the industry. That's something that happens in a lot of industries, not just gaming.

I am not boycotting a game that hundreds if not thousands of people have worked on for several years based on some he said/she said bullshit on Twitter where neither party has brought any evidence to the table. Neither would I call Taylor greedy or anything else, but there is probably a reason she's not returning to the role and it has nothing to do with money on a production as big as this - this game is probably well beyond $100M in production cost, anyone that really thinks that they're trying to save a couple of thousand dollars so close to release is crazy. People on the Internet need to understand that they do not have to choose sides on every conflict that they don't know anything about.

Do unionized voice actors in games not get bonuses and stuff based on sales? That's fairly common for Hollywood (as far as I know) and it makes sense for voice actors, too.

@bladeofcreation: There's no royalties or anything for video game work, so any bonus would have to just be part of a specific contract.

@apewins: A $100M budget would put the game in the list of the most expensive games ever made, while Bayonetta 1 and 2 sold a bit over a million each. That would basically sink the while company.

a boycott being unjustified implies buying a video game is a moral imperative so sure, i dont see how not wanting to buy the game for this is any different from not wanting to buy microtransactions in Babylon's fall.

I don't know how accurate this site is, but they say the going rate is $200-350/hour. If she did perform about 16 hours of work, that'd be $250. So on the low end, but still within that range. Depending on the game's budget, I guess that seems pretty reasonable. I mean Bayonetta is an iconic character, but the games were never hugely successful commercially. 1 did fairly well, 2 didn't. 3 always sort of felt like Nintendo putting money into a game that would give them clout with enthusiasts more than anything else. With that in mind, I'd imagine that rate is probably pretty reflective of the budget of the game.

@jasonr86: I'm pretty sure the sales for Bayo2 were pretty solid once it escaped the vice grip of being stuck on the Wii U.

@efesell: From what I’m gathering, it’s still under Bayonetta 1 on Switch. Granted 1 was on two consoles. I guess 1 sold 1.5 millions and 2 is just over 1 million on Switch, so probably 1.5 altogether with the Wii U. Not bad, but not a big seller, you know?

@theonewhoplays said:

Nintendo is picking up the tab for this game as a Switch exclusive so I don't think looking at traditional sales numbers is really reflective of the cost, if Nintendo weren't involved then obviously this game would never happened. And the game has been in development for 5+ years. But anyway, maybe I overestimated the budget but bottom line is that absolutely no company that isn't a mom&pop store is going to fight anyone for $4K, or $8K, or $16K. This isn't about money, I imagine that if Taylor had accepted the offer they still wouldn't have used her because obviously they don't want to work with her.

Bayonetta sold 1M when it was released in 2009. It has obviously sold more over time with numerous ports, I myself have bought it 4 times (original release, Xbox One digital version, PC Steam version, bundled with Bayonetta 2 on Switch). Bayonetta 2 on the other hand was originally released for the Wii U, which wasn't great for any game that was released on that platform, at least ones that weren't called Mario and Zelda. Bayonetta 3 is going to sell really well now that it's on a console that people actually own, provided that the game is good obviously.

@jasonr86:

That seems to be pretty accurate. You can see the actual union-agreed wages on SAG-AFTRA's site.

https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2020InteractiveRateSheetFinal.pdf

So Nintendo/Platinum essentially offered her the base rate for a video game VO. Is that a lowball? I'm not sure. Is that an offensively low insult? Probably not.

@apewins: Makes sense that Nintendo foots at least some of the bill, maybe even most of it. I would like to know the details one day since Platinum always seem to be struggling to stay above water. As much as I've enjoyed alot of their output they all seem pretty low-budget, even something like Revengeance and Nier: A. And none of their own games have ever been massive hits, except perhaps Nier, which they don't own.

I'm just arguing that I have serious doubts that Bayonetta 3 is going to some smash hit, and I also think that Nintendo/Platinum aren't foolish enough to throw a giant budget at a niche game that probably won't ever reach even DMC levels of sales. They lost a good chunk of sales with the Nintendo exclusivity too, even if they gained the Nintendo money. I myself was a big enough fan in the day that I bought Bayo 2 and W101 even though I didn't own a Wii U. Never even bought one. But those days are over, I won't buy a Switch just to play 2-3 games (Nintendo games, while fun, aren't enough to make me pay for a console that ships with unusable controllers, and worse 3rd party support).

Of course 4K still wouldn't be alot with whatever budget they ended up with. But I also doubt Platinum would try to intentionally low-ball an actor they didn't want. They just wouldn't have contacted her in the first place. It's not like games haven't switched VA's before. Pretty sure they are just cheap and didn't want to pay more for a less-known VA.

@lyndbako: So, they offered entry-level pay to someone with 20 years experience in the field. That's kinda messed up, assuming Hellena is being truthful.

@judaspete:

According to her IMDb, if it’s accurate, she doesn’t have a lot of credits. She had the hold over Bayonetta, but aside from that she doesn’t really seem worth beyond the base rate for an experienced actor, honestly.

@jasonr86: You're missing the point. It doesn't matter that she didn't work on a lot of projects besides Bayonetta. The point is, she was the one who brought that character to life and made her popular on two games in the series that sold real well over the years. That's like an on-screen actor who helped create a huge franchise, but saying they don't deserve more money for another sequel, because their IMBb shows they didn't work on 50 other films prior. Like Taylor said, she wasn't asking for a fortune, just more than the basic rate because of the history of her playing that character, which seems more than just. Think of it this way, say you worked for a company long enough to feel you deserve a raise, and when you ask for one they say, no standard is good enough for you. Would you accept that, or would you say, "Oh well, what I'm making is the basic rate at least. I should accept this and be happy despite my 10 years of employment."

@jasonr86: If I’m the lead role in a series now on its third game (plus multimedia) and my voice, if not name, is defining to the character you better believe I expect more then the minimum.

She must have misunderstood. There's a lot of chatter about boycotting shitty companies in the gaming world. But actual boycotts on behalf of someone else are never in play.

Gamers only care if they themselves are being exploited through overprized lootboxes or pay to win schemes.

4000$ seems fairly low, especially for a well-known character like Bayonetta (although the character seems more famous than the sales would imply), but at the same time voice actors in the gaming-sphere just don't have the star power of hollywood actors that get paid extraordinary amounts for their characters, eventhough we consider their characters iconic and pair it with their voices in our mind.

From what i gather she has done the previous 2 Bayo games too. I wonder what the progression of wages was throughout those games and how many sessions went into those games. 4000$ for 40 hours of work would be pretty awesome in my view, but clearly it's a far cry of the wages that the top 1% earn for similar work. And for the travel, auditioning and general uncertainty of the job, it has to finally pay off more than my convenient office job does for people to even want to pursue such a career.

Most companies would try to retain a beloved voice for the series, and be willing to increase their offer to do so. Especially if the alternative is having to pay a lot more to get one of the main A-list talents instead. A bit of a strange conclusion to this saga.

Obviously I don't know how many lines of dialogue are in Bayo3, but $4000 is a fucking pittance either way and gross. It's wild to me we have people in this thread waxing philosophical about this situation: she's right, they're wrong. If that is, by some stretch of insane imagination, understandable as a rate for a voice job for THE TITULAR LEAD CHARACTER OF A VIDEO GAME in this industry, then the industry is fucked. There is no scenario where, if what she is saying is true, any of this is okay, and I really wish we (as a general society) would stop this bootlicking reaction in situations like these.

the industry is fucked

That it is indeed. In a just world, you wouldn't even have to worry about the wages that voice actors get offered when they have starred in multi-million productions. Just like you don't have to worry about the top basketball payers wages. The industry employs a lot of people in suits that create all these powerpoint presentations and make budgets and do forecasts and manage teams that all get handsomely paid, but at the end of the day a certain slice of the pie is devoted to voice talent and if they can get a decent performer for a low price, they're going to take that every day of the week if the first choice doesn't fit anywhere near the projected cost. Because the pie has already been set in stone. hands have been shook over these figures. Approval stamps have been given. Knowing that it won't make a significant dent in the sales if they get another quality voice actor.

Honestly, listening to her talking about this i hear a lot of sadness and worry. The gasprices and electricity costs have completely exploded here in Europe. Inflation is through the roof. Driving up and down to go towards a low paying job (or auditioning for the chance to get a job) is financially unfeasible for more and more people. People that have never needed any subsidy or support from the government in their lives are now no longer getting paid enough to make ends meet. Working, yet poor. My government had to straight up help to pay our utility bills because otherwise literally half the country can no longer pay the bills.

The voice acting business seems quite unstable and requires a lot of traveling. Perhaps the fees were just reasonable enough back in the olden days, but now in this new situation it's straight up not financially wise to travel around for 4000$ here and there. So when you then look back at what you've done to get to this position and how much work you've put into your career, it's quite upsetting that you might not be able to make a living wage, eventhough the work you do is valued across the globe and of a high standard.

@sethmode: It is a little disheartening. Whether it merits a boycott is a conversation but it’s another thing to see the story and think I bet I can conjure up a reason why she deserved this.

I guess my favorite is “but golly did she have to be so RUDE?”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-18/bayonetta-3-voice-actor-s-pay-dispute-overshadows-nintendo-game

Schreier on this pretty quick, as one might expect. I’m not sure this clarifies too much of the facts all in all but the call for boycott is an even bigger stretch.

@efesell: I think it's pretty important in the article that they kind of provide Platinum's side that the offer was $4,000 per session and she was asking six figures and residuals.

I also think there's far more to it than just money. Jennifer Hale was a major voice in the voice actors' strike and it makes no sense that she'd take a job where she was replacing someone who wasn't brought back for financial reasons. Her whole platform is that voice actors should be paid more like movie actors.

I also think it strengthens the call for a boycott with other voice actors chiming in with how little they were paid for major projects. Companies keep getting away with it because they can.

$15-20K sounds like a less insulting number. I think whether or not she deserved more still is debatable, but I don't think anyone in video games is ever going to get six figures and residuals.

@av_gamer: Are we gonna update this when more info...comes in...all for jumping at the headlines and supporting the underdog but this is another situation where you have to take in all the info and decide. Support actors, they deserve it, but there seems to be even more to the story...apparently thousands of dollars more lol...still hope she gets what she's valued and the company works out ok...win win type of thing. Bayonetta isn't exactly AAA, though people niche into it push it like it is...just passionate people work on it and make a AA game look and feel AAA IMO...not uncharted or GOW levels of polish IMO.

This. VO / Motion Capture Actors are still actors and the projects they're involved in make hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars... and they get peanuts.

The corpo greed and disrespect is fucking insulting.

Think about this:

Tom Holland & Mark Wahlberg made MILLIONS, possibly 10's of millions for a single, middling / mediocre Uncharted movie (that stole liberally from the video games), which is more money than Nolan North (Nathan Drake) and Richard McGonagle (Victor "Goddamn" Sullivan) made, combined, FOR EVERY UNCHARTED GAME IN THE FRANCHISE (which sold over 41+ million copies combined), by a wide margin.

A big reason that Tom and Mark made millions is directly on the back of the work Nolan and Richard did bringing those characters and that franchise to life for over a decade.

The same can be said for Chris Pratt vs. Charles Martinet: Chris Pratt will make millions, far more than Charles Martinet ever did or will.

I wonder how much the checker at safeway makes...

@topcyclist: My post was asking a question. And while I do support Taylor as my own opinions show, there are two sides to every story. The major gaming sites and personalities are covering the story now, so it isn't hard to get updates and decide for yourself who you want to support. If you side with Platinum Games and believe Taylor got greedy, that option is there for you to check with the poll, and the forum is open to explain why you feel this way. Honestly, though, this story blew up a lot more than I thought it would.

@av_gamer: I don't remember saying i support the company...I wrote that I'd rather support the underdog...basically unless you thought the company was the underdog or see a Win Win...I'd rather everyone was happy but Im not going around not believing someone...cause ehhh...more asking if we will update tick by tick as more info gets verified. I'd hate to spit at anyone without full knowledge of what's going on...gross example. Anyway, i see people on both sides saying the other is lying and I'll just assume the underdog is being treated like the underdog usually is...

I've finally picked for the greedy option but neither of them sound right to pick. To try and accurately monetise a person's effort on a project like Bayonetta is tough to quantify. People might say the voice makes the character but that kind of short changes the animators that brought her model to life. They're paid a lot less than she would've been.

Comparing to movie actors, they're more to their characters than a voice actor is in gaming. At least until voice actors start doing performance capture.

I think Platinum made the $15,000 offer. I think she refused on scheduling and/or monetary grounds. I don't think Platinum wanted to hire Hale in the first place.

I'm seeing articles appear (Bloomberg, Video Game Chronicle) claiming things aren't what they appear and she was offered much more than she suggests, there's also talk of her mental state which might be influencing her actions here.

I'm not picking a side since i'm not involved and we're just going on people's words, i just hope she gets the support she might need and the people making the game aren't negatively affected by this, but i think it's too late for that.

Justified? I mean, if this makes people not want to play the game (or, if it makes them feel good to not play the game) then IMHO those people do not need more "justification" than that for their personal choice.

Personally I don't care and won't be boycotting. I'm not her agent and barely have enough energy to fight battles over my own wages, much less get wrapped up in hers. Though given that I'd possibly even prefer Bayonetta without VA (I come to it for the joy of pressing buttons in the right order and rhythm) it's hardly a surprise that I'm not particularly moved by this.

Welp. If this is true, I'm not sure what to think. $15,000 isn't nearly as bad as $4,000.

Ultimately I am still all for “Fuck that I’m worth more” and then getting out the matches.

I don't really understand why a 10 to 15,000 increase would make anyone's opinion of the situation change. That's still an awful, paltry sum that someone like Mila Jovivich could make in an afternoon playing Bayonetta in the movie. The reason for being grossed out/frustrated remains, even if (especially because?) this is considered good by some terrible some industry standard.

Should she be offered more money? Perhaps, but I'm not that invested in voice-actors. Seems to me she put all her eggs in the Nintendo/Bayonetta basket and regrets it. You can hear it in her voice, she realized that voice actors aren't that of an import job and this is her trying to claw at the last string of rope.

Let's give other voice actors a chance also. I'm tired of the perpetual voice actors for characters that get paid a lot in royalties (looking at you Nolan...) and gigs and the rest is fighting for crumbs.

@sethmode said:

This is roughly $1,000 an hour. I want to know what you do for a living if you think that's a terrible rate.

And I don't understand why people are trying to force an actors vs voice actors comparison here. I guarantee you that Milla Jovovich spent more than 16 hours on the set of the Monster Hunter movie for example. And that's not accounting for the time she spent at the gym getting ready for the movie, or you think that type of physique comes naturally to a 40-something year old?

Update on this crazy train. People have been digging through a bunch of old tweets and turns out she bad vibes there too. In support of TERFs, Blue Lives Matter, Religious Zealots, the whole deal.

@daavpuke: I mean that sucks hate to see it but I think everyone’s gravitating to a more fundamental issue.

Do hate to see it though.

@efesell: I understand. It's just that people are using bits of partial information to do partial speculation. This is another auxiliary piece of whatever puzzle this is. Call it a show of character.

I've also seen a bunch of people in light of this saying they're now gonna preorder again. It's a mess. I feel a lot of this could've been prevented if they had just gone with another VA, rather than an industry standard. No one cares about random VAs (which is kinda the problem), so that would've removed a lot of leverage.

Sure, but remember, being crazy about other things doesn't mean she's being crazy about this. Or, even if she's being crazy about this specific situation (e.g. misrepresenting the amount of money she was offered), the general argument about compensation in the video game industry has been a raging dumpster fire for decades.

We have firm evidence that a lot of video game companies abuse their coders, artists, QA people, etc. It's become so much of a trope, that studios are started with "we treat our workers decently" as a selling point. But, voice actors are the one exception? C'mon.

People don't want to think about it because they don't want to consider reality outside of the game. The same way people don't want to think about the costs that favourite brands might have beyond simple price. You're emotionally invested in something, it's "good" in your universe. You don't want to find out that what you think is "good" was actually made in an ethically questionable manner. Nobody likes dealing with that dissonance.

It would be pretty nice to get 15K for 20-25 hours work, if true. Anyway, the fundamental issue of it all is that there is a lot of money floating around but they will always go to the people who are already wealthy and powerful, our whole system is made to keep a few people insanely rich while the rest can only fight for the scraps. In Bayonetta 4 she should fight neo liberals, who have done alot more harm than any angels or devils.

@turtlefish said:

Yes, they are. In this case it is THE voice actor, and not someone who's doing the voice of enemy soldier #3. There are certain jobs that you absolutely do not want to underpay for because that will directly influence the quality of your work in a way that everybody who's playing the game will notice and cannot be swept under the rug or patched in after release. If Platinum genuinely tried to low-ball their leading actor, their biggest worry wouldn't be that she'd decline, but that she would accept and come in to do a terrible job and now you either delay the game to re-record the lines with someone else, or release it and become a laughing stock of the game world.

Think about it from the perspective of a sports team for example. If you're the LA Lakers, you can get away with underpaying your event staff, your lower-level trainers and physicians, maybe your 18-year old future talent. But you can't get away with underpaying LeBron James because if he's unhappy, you're in big trouble that simply isn't worth the money that you'd potentially be saving.

Besides, your QA staff and others are on a monthly salary. If you have a dozen testers and you can save $500 a month on every one of them, over 10 years that will make a difference on your bottom line. A voice actor for a game that releases once in 7 years is a one-time cost that simply does not matter in the big picture.

These recent developments aren't surprising. This is what happens when one person tries to go up against a major industry. The industry has the power and the resources to smear that person's character in an effort to discredit them. Now, if she really is a bigot whom supports police getting away with brutality, which is what the whole "Blue Lives Matter" thing is really about, then that's no good and I wouldn't befriend her personally. But it still doesn't change the overall point that voice actors in general, especially ones voicing a very major character deserve a decent wage. That is the real conversation, but in the social media age where people love the gossip, this will get lost in translation, which is what Platinum Games and the Industry overall is hoping for.

Anyone else feel like this whole thing has gotten really dumb and weird? Like, as I get older, the 'court of public opinion' that has only escalated with the internet has become more and more gross to me. This is like example A.