Everything Everywhere Once A Week (10/21/2022)

Welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week. We’re a little late this week because there’s a lot to talk about. Also I think, unless Patrons feel really strongly the other way, this newsletter might just go fully public too. Undecided, but I think it’s best to just make it public while I’m hemming and hawing on it.

Bayonetta Voice Actress Pay Dispute Gets Complicated

A few weeks ago, a small story in this newsletter was about Bayonetta’s voice actress being replaced with Jennifer Hale taking on the role as Bayonetta 1 and 2 voice actress Hellena Taylor left the role. In that story, I wrote that we’re unlikely to ever fully know why it happened, and that’s still true, but we know a bit more than before and it has gotten worlds more complicated since then.

On October 15, Taylor posted several tweets and videos explaining her reasons for not returning to the role, which turned out to be non-voluntary. Taylor stated that, after years of voicing the character (2008 for Bayonetta, 2014 for Bayonetta 2), she was only offered $4000 for her role in Bayonetta 3. She said this was especially bad considering that Bayonetta is a $450 million dollar franchise even before considering merchandise sales. In the second video, she stated that “fat cats cream off the top” and that “nurses are going to food banks” in England as related statements. She entreated the viewer that if anyone cares about people, they would boycott Bayonetta 3.

In the third video, Taylor describes the back-and-forth with PlatinumGames, stating she was required to audition for the role again and was given “an insulting offer” in return. She said she wrote to Hideki Kamiya, Vice President of PlatinumGames and director of both the original Bayonetta and Bayonetta 3, and received a reply that resulted in the $4000 offer. Following that, she indicted Jennifer Hale as not being the real Bayonetta, merely a parrot of her original voice.

She also suggested that PlatinumGames is working on a spinoff based on Jeanne, telling the audience not to buy that either.

It was an explosive allegation, one that hit many emotional beats and fed into a comfortable and well-worn narrative of large companies like Nintendo paying pennies for voice work. That narrative works so well because it is, as far as anyone can tell, incredibly true. Voice work in video games gets peanuts compared to other mediums, where things like residuals and royalties are part and parcel of the gig. Taylor’s plea struck a chord with many people even when several of the things she was saying seemed fairly suspicious at the time.

Kamiya, who Taylor said she had written a letter to, subtweeted the videos by calling them untruthful and, anticipating a backlash from Twitter accounts, warned people about his rules that land people on his hefty blocklist. He eventually had to temporarily delete his Twitter account, which was a cause for celebration for many.

A Bloomberg story this week indicated that Taylor’s videos were not all they seemed to be and cast a new light, or maybe a new shadow, on the truthfulness of all her claims.

For most of the rest of this newsletter, we’re going to talk a bit about this whole thing in detail, and how there’s really no winners or losers here. Any third party taking a victory lap over guessing Taylor was being deceitful is probably kind of an asshole.

Something’s Off

That said, let’s start off by being kind of an asshole. Taylor’s initial statement just straight up did not make sense. If it were still my job to be an investigative reporter, I probably would have come in that morning trying to figure out what on Earth she meant by Bayonetta being a $450 million dollar franchise. Bayonetta barely survived to make a sequel, if it were a $450 million dollar franchise, I am pretty sure Sega would never let it be exclusive to Wii U or Switch.

That number, across two games, would be about a quarter of Grand Theft Auto IV. Now, granted, those two games have been ported around here and there, but we’re probably talking about a ceiling of three million in sales at likely massively discounted prices. Sniffing at GTA numbers is extremely unlikely.

The only thing I can guess is that Taylor googled Bayonetta’s sales, used VGChartz — which has always been an estimation at best — added up every number on there including the redundant ones, and came to 7.5 million sales. Then she multiplied that by $60 and got $450,000,000. There’s so many reasons that doesn’t make sense to do, but it’s the most generous possible interpretation of that number.

The other time Taylor gives hard numbers is the other eyebrow-raising detail of her testimony: a pitifully low $4,000 offer. I am fully willing to believe that video game developers and publishers lowball voice actors all the time. We found out fairly recently that even the anime dubbing industry does it to a genuinely monstrous degree, with the actors in the massive Jujutsu Kaisen movie getting only $150 - $300 for a movie making tens of millions of dollars.

A problem comes roaring in at that point that offering Taylor that number and then going to Jennifer Hale, a decidedly prolific voice actor who certainly commanded a price far above that, means Taylor’s story is at best incomplete. If they offered her such little money and then went on to pay Hale a decent rate, then they must have been trying to buck Taylor for some reason or another. If that’s the case, it raises way more questions than Taylor’s video answers.

But because of how charged her videos were, and how easy it was to believe the injustice of it, there was not a lot of breathing room for those questions. Which is a shame, because a good narrative that overrides the truth only harms the cause when the truth eventually comes out.

Investigative Journalism

As mentioned above, Bloomberg came out with a story this week that disputed Taylor’s account. Jason Schreier, who had seen documentation concerning Taylor’s proposed contract, said that Taylor’s accusations about only being offered $4000 were essentially lies of omission. She had been offered $3000 - $5000 a session for around five sessions. After Taylor countered with a six-figure price, PlatinumGames sought out Hale. The developer offered Taylor $4000, the number she stated in the video, for a cameo role presumably after her letter written to Kamiya.

When asked to respond, Taylor charged that PlatinumGames is lying, though did not supply her own copy of the offer despite having already broken NDA and disavowed its power over her. She said she wished to move on from the series, a surprising tone after spending half a video declaring that she was the only true Bayonetta and that it mattered greatly to her.

I have seen some people suggest that these documents could have been fabricated. As someone who has done this job, let me tell you that the chance of that is so infinitesimal that it’s laughable to even suggest it. Somewhere in the possibility chances in the universe, yes, Jason Schreier could have been fooled by these things and not done any verification of them at all.

But investigative reporting is a job that involves skills. I feel that’s what people miss when they suggest that the evidence might be faked or that journalists should give up anonymous sources. It’s a job where you get better at it through experience, but you also cultivate skills that most people who don’t do this job don’t have and are never going to need.

Taylor likely thought that Nintendo and PlatinumGames would never have spoken up about it, which they probably would not have. Even in PlatinumGames’ statement, they don’t really talk about the meat of the accusations at all and merely ask people not to harass the voice actors. I don’t think she figured someone would go digging. After all, why would they? It’s only video games.

The Kamiya of It All

Shortly after the videos, Kamiya posted his tweet, and began blocking people left and right that replied and quote-retweeted to dunk on him. This resulted in a lot of people pushing even harder to attack him for what Taylor named and shamed him for: mistreating workers as a financial fatcat and as a Twitter asshole. Eventually, Twitter locked his account because the sheer amount of replies and blocking convinced the algorithm he must have been hacked.

I’ve been following Kamiya on Twitter for a long time. As a director, he made a lot of games I like a lot, like Devil May Cry, Resident Evil 2, Okami, and Bayonetta. Early on, he would respond to every single person that tweeted at him with a question. He liked using it to practice his english, he said. The account was mostly questions about Resident Evil 1.5, what kind of ice cream Bayonetta likes, and him showing off retro games and his modest little apartment.

Around 2012, a years-long wave of harassment from console warriors started bubbling up. It was mostly over Bayonetta 2, but a surprising amount also came from talking about other video games. He said he wanted to make Star Fox, which lead to constant tagging of him every time fans begged for a new game. He posted that he thinks God of War should influence Devil May Cry 5, which lead to people calling him a race traitor, a washed-up hack, and a bald fuck.

In 2019, I saw Kamiya lounging on a couch in a back room at GDC, and I sat down and talked to him. PR did not want it to be an on-the-record interview, so we just chatted a bit with a mutual friend acting as a translator. I asked Kamiya about his Twitter account and if he disliked interacting with the trolls so much, why doesn’t he just delete Twitter for his mental health.

“Because then they’d win,” he told me.

The actual man is polite and meek, a far cry from his Twitter persona. He just wants to talk about Japanese sentai heroes and TG-16 games. But years of harassment have clearly made him combat-ready whenever he logs on to Twitter. Which, honestly, I get. At some point — and that point is probably over 10,000 followers — Twitter can become a genuinely hostile place.

It’s very hard to express to people how it feels to wake up to Tweets from people you have never met but who genuinely, truly believe that they hate you with every fiber of their being. You don’t know what it’s like to post engagement pictures and see people making fun of your fiancee’s teeth on one of the happiest days of your lives together. Most people live under the radar and while I’m not saying every aspect of having a large following is bad, the considerations of what it does to your mental health absolutely have to be acknowledged.

When the Taylor situation broke, so did Kamiya, to an extent. He has “rules” about tweeting at him in english as he says that’s where most of the harassment comes from, but he’s always still answered questions in english. This time, though, he put up every shield he had, including aggressive ones. And that just made people angrier with him.

Which, again, if I were getting tweets like this, I’d go on a rampage, too.

There's a relatively famous picture of a teenage Kamiya posing next to his mother. A Resetera user posted this picture in the thread about Taylor's accusations, stating that it was no wonder that Kamiya's mother ran away when he was younger.

A lot of people felt justified at the time how they interacted or viewed Kamiya’s flameout on Twitter. As someone that has met him, I was kind of upset by it. Maybe he should have just shut up and let PlatinumGames handle it with a statement rather than letting it explode on him, but the glee in which I saw people root for the explosion gave me pause.

An Actual Labor Problem

One thing I have seen a lot of people ask after Bloomberg’s story came out is a fairly reasonable question: Why would Taylor ask for six figures (at least $100,000) for Bayonetta 3, a game that is definitely not going to break any sales records and has a fairly modest budget? My guess is probably Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which features Bayonetta as a playable character.

In the credits for Smash Bros., Bayonetta’s voice is credited to Taylor, though only as archival use. That means that Nintendo reused Taylor’s voice clips from previous work, notably the Bayonetta games. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate went on to sell 28 million copies so far. Now you and I can say that it probably didn’t sell that much solely because Taylor’s voice is in the game, but if I were an actor in a piece of media that made a billion and a half dollars, I’d probably be pretty miffed at the lack of residuals too. I’d probably demand a pretty high price point for my next role.

I heard a story recently where Ernie Sabella, the voice of Pumbaa in The Lion King, went to go see Toy Story in theaters. At one point in the movie, about one and a half seconds of Hakuna Matata plays, and Sabella is understandably confused by this. He calls up his agent, who finds out from Disney that they completely fucked up and they forgot to get Sabella and Nathan Lane’s blessing for this even though Disney owns the song because they were the performers. So the pair have gotten paid hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years with every Toy Story release because of one second in a major product.

This doesn’t happen in video games. Residuals aren’t a thing, royalties aren’t a thing, not for voice actors, not for programmers, not for marketing, not for level designers. All of those people should be getting some piece of the pie, but they won’t, because no one wants to change incrementally since it leaves others briefly behind and no one wants to change everything because it’s too hard.

Going off timing, my belief is that Taylor saw the Game Informer quote stating that she wasn’t voicing Bayonetta due to an implied scheduling conflict and, without really thinking it through, filmed some videos that were misleading in nature to really stick it to PlatinumGames and Nintendo.

Was Hellena Taylor being deceitful with her claims? Considering the evidence, probably. Was she correct that video game voice actors are being screwed? More definitively yes. Did the fallout from not thinking it through harm the overall discussion of voice actor pay? Also probably yes.

If Taylor had done the same videos but used the number $15,000 or said she was in a video game that has sold nearly 30 million copies but she hasn’t seen a cent, I think people would have still been pretty incensed on her behalf. Maybe not as much, but still enough to jumpstart the conversation. She didn’t need to use a low-blow to win, but in doing so, she kind of muddied the waters for everyone.

But I don’t think this has to be a discussion of Hellena Taylor at all. It should be a discussion of the Breath of the Wild voice actors, who were paid a pittance for their role in a game that sold 25 million copies. Or of the Mob Psycho 100 actors who were punted from the english cast for trying to hold to their union guidelines. Hell, it should be about how everyone in the game industry should be paid better than they are and given contracts that respect them as human beings rather than manipulable labor resources.

Oh Yeah, That Thing…

One thing I haven’t talked about is the social sleuthing that went on combing through Taylor’s social media accounts after all this blew up. People found that she was following a lot of problematic people on Twitter including the Trump family, had a difficult time showing support for trans rights and not actually doing it, and really seemed to buy into Blue Lives Matter rhetoric. The reason I’m not talking about that is I don’t think it factors into the labor discussion.

What it does factor into is that I think she probably sucks. It factors into the idea that the same people who sell MAGA-labeled gold bills to idiots also realize those skills work on emotional pleas to an audience that is expecting outrage. So she can fuck off all the way into space for that stuff.

Other Things This Week:

• Hey it’s those impressions I wrote of the remake of Resident Evil 4 
• Is Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope bwah or blah? 

Things to Look Forward to Next Week:

• A new episode of Materia Possessions with Michael Higham, Andrea Shearon, and Nerium Strom
• We can talk about a recent horror game I played
• Gotham Knights is bad and I don’t want to play more of it but I might write about it