The Nintendo Thread of Existential Doom

[MCBanjoMike]

Basically everyone who's ever commented on Virtual Console sales has said that people only want to buy the same 10 games over and over and ignore everything else; the essence of people not putting their money where their extremely loud Twitter mouths are

I'm the exception to that rule! After buying tons of PSOne Classics, I completely skipped the PS4 once it became clear that they weren't going to bring those games to the platform. And I have a decent library of Wii VC games, but I completely refuse to pay for Nintendo's online service just so I can play the ones I already own again. I have made, shall we say, other arrangements.

As a side note, it made me SO HAPPY that Sony gave free copies of the PSX games they added to PS+ to those who had previously bought them. For now, all that gets me is yet another way to play Wild Arms, but it's a really nice gesture.

 

[Violentvixen]

If you have no one local I'd figure Nintendo is probably your best bet. I've had consoles repaired before (PS3, some years ago) when there was a local guy who did that, and it was at least $60. Factor in shipping costs and you're going to hit close to a hundred anyway, I would think.

Ooh, I didn't even think about shipping being included or not. Good point.

 

[ArugulaZ]

I'm the exception to that rule! After buying tons of PSOne Classics, I completely skipped the PS4 once it became clear that they weren't going to bring those games to the platform. And I have a decent library of Wii VC games, but I completely refuse to pay for Nintendo's online service just so I can play the ones I already own again. I have made, shall we say, other arrangements.

As a side note, it made me SO HAPPY that Sony gave free copies of the PSX games they added to PS+ to those who had previously bought them. For now, all that gets me is yet another way to play Wild Arms, but it's a really nice gesture.

Given the fact that they've made these games increasingly difficult to put on your PS3 or Vita, I think they owed their fanbase that much. In fact, my understanding is that there still aren't a huge pool of PS Classics and PSP Classics available for either the PS4 or PS5. I was under the impression that we were going to get free access to a whole lot of the games we already purchased for the PS3 and/or Vita, but we've been getting them in a trickle at best.

 

[Issun]

It's been pretty clear that the companies that made the games don't give a shit if they are preserved unless a respectable return on investment can be made. This is why, I think, we keep getting less down on emulation unless we have to pretend to be so we don't end up in legal trouble.

Although Blizzard erasing Overwatch 1 from existence once 2 came out poses a whole new preservation issue, Better minds than my own will have to figure that one out.

 

[Becksworth]

One problem with me and retro games is I don't want to keep having to rebuying the same ones over and over without either some major improvements or at least some major discount. I'm still all about buying retro games I either never played or haven't been rereleased often. Chrono Cross/Radical Dreamers being a good example of this.

Chrono Trigger, meanwhile, I have like four different copies of. Unless they are making a HD 2D remake or putting it in a big bundle or something I'm probably sticking with the emulation route with it for the future. Sorry, not sorry.

 

[Sarge]

Maybe give people both options then. I didn't buy many games on VC, but they were generally the more oddball ones like Ufouria or Do Re Mi Fantasy that were harder to get physically.

 

[Purple]

It's been pretty clear that the companies that made the games don't give a shit if they are preserved unless a respectable return on investment can be made. This is why, I think, we keep getting less down on emulation unless we have to pretend to be so we don't end up in legal trouble.

Although Blizzard erasing Overwatch 1 from existence once 2 came out poses a whole new preservation issue, Better minds than my own will have to figure that one out.

Also possibly a legal issue? It's already kind of a grey issue when something gets patched beyond recognition but like, I bought a piece of software from you, you remotely deleted it from my computer, and are trying to buy me off with something else as a consolation which I don't want and made no agreement to take in its stead.

 

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

One problem with me and retro games is I don't want to keep having to rebuying the same ones over and over without either some major improvements or at least some major discount. I'm still all about buying retro games I either never played or haven't been rereleased often. Chrono Cross/Radical Dreamers being a good example of this.

Pilotwings 64 ticks all these boxes for me: I haven't played it since the N64, it hasn't been re-released since the N64, and it's been enhanced, to boot!

 

[Juno]

Posting this here since we don't have a Bayonetta thread.

Bayonetta's Original Voice Actress: 'I Urge People To Boycott This Game' Over 'Insulting' Pay Offer

Hellena Taylor, the original voice actress for Bayonetta, claims she wasn't offered a living wage by PlatinumGames for the upcoming Switch exclusive

kotaku.com

 

[Purple]

So, there's kind of a bunch of things about this one that give me serious pause talking about it.

The timing is a bit weird, because she passed on taking the role.. years ago I think?

My understanding from talking to various voice actors is that that's actually a pretty reasonable/above average offer for the amount of recording time we're actually talking about here, presumably comparable for what the earlier games paid, and apparently enough to replace her with one of the biggest names out there.

It's also been pointed out that (in recent years?) she's gotten all into following nasty right wingers, particularly Trump's whole family and at least one big name TERF, which may or may not be a factor in things?

And you know, even ignoring all that, the story here, such as it is, is just... an actress was offered a job, and chose not to take it.

Like, if I'm gonna get behind a boycott, I kinda need more to go on than that? Like if they actually hired her for an initially offer of way more money and then they outright refused to pay, that'd be something maybe, but there doesn't really seem to be a problem here to get up in arms about.

So personally I'm wondering if there's some second shoe waiting to drop on why she actually turned it down/wasn't even offered it, or if it's just a right winger deciding to check if she has enough of a personal following to take a shot at the old directing a bunch of angry social media followers to attack people thing. But barring hearing any of that, yeah I'm gonna go mind my own business.

 

[Sprite]

Yeah I'm definitely too ignorant to know what is and isn't insulting in these incidents. Both Taylor and Hale are union so I assume the amount offered was within union guidelines. $451/hr is definitely a living wage. I think Taylor just overestimated how much she was worth to the franchise and tried to hardball them into a better deal. Her last IMDB credit is Smash Bros. in 2014 so it sounds like her career is just going poorly in general.

 

[ArugulaZ]

Evidently Hideki Kamiya decided to leave Twitter. Certainly the fastest way to block everyone from your Twitter account is to just remove it entirely.

 

[conchobhar]

The story doesn't add up. If Platinum only offered Helena Taylor $4000, and she turned that down, why would they then turn to Jennifer Hale? Hale is one of the biggest names in the industry and obviously commands a fee of more than four thousand dollars; Platinum surely spent more money by hiring her instead. So if Taylor isn't lying (or at least being creative with her numbers), then there's something more to this that we aren't hearing. I'm with Purple on this.

 

[ShakeWell]

Yeah I'm definitely too ignorant to know what is and isn't insulting in these incidents. Both Taylor and Hale are union so I assume the amount offered was within union guidelines. $451/hr is definitely a living wage. I think Taylor just overestimated how much she was worth to the franchise and tried to hardball them into a better deal. Her last IMDB credit is Smash Bros. in 2014 so it sounds like her career is just going poorly in general.

I don't know why you'd assume that, given the game industry's long-standing opposition to it. A lot of actors get brow-beaten into doing it NOT at union scale under psudonyms. Also, yeah, sure, $451 an hour is a living wage at 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, but not when you're going gig-to-gig. And this pretty clearly wasn't union, because there's a 0% chance that main character dialogue for a AAA game is a ten-ish hour job. You're giving an awful lot of leeway to Nintendo and Platinum on this one.

Obviously, I know just as much of the story as anyone else, but Platinum not being forthcoming about their side and Kamiya opting to nuke his own Twitter rather than explain what happened doesn't exactly make me feel like they're the good guys here, whatever assumptions we're making about Hellena Taylor's politics.

 

[Becksworth]

As I mentioned on the Discord, apparently some of the comments people were leaving were of the racist variety or about Kamiya's family, so I wouldn't read too much into him closing his social media presence.

Edit: Twitter account is back up now apparently. I don't know, maybe he was getting spammed by bots too or something...

 

[Regulus]

They hired pro-union Jennifer Hale and all of the other actors are union, so this is almost certainly a union gig. This is also an action game -- there's not nearly as much dialogue as you would think. Per Taylor herself, Bayonetta 1 was recorded in four sessions that were four hours each. At base SAG AFTRA rates, that's actually pretty much in line with 4k. If it was four sessions like the first game, that's then they basically offered her the SAG-AFTRA minimum rate. But if it it was only for 2 or 3 sessions? Given that they apparently offered less than 4k and only increased the offer during negotiation, it seems likely this is the case. But we won't know unless we get more information.

The story doesn't add up. If Platinum only offered Helena Taylor $4000, and she turned that down, why would they then turn to Jennifer Hale? Hale is one of the biggest names in the industry and obviously commands a fee of more than four thousand dollars; Platinum surely spent more money by hiring her instead. So if Taylor isn't lying (or at least being creative with her numbers), then there's something more to this that we aren't hearing. I'm with Purple on this.

Honestly? I have no context for what the pay scale looks like for top talent in voice acting. Hale is the best of the best at her job and obviously in demand enough that she has no trouble finding roles, but I don't know how much that translates into an increase over the base rate. 2x? 3x? 4x? I seriously doubt it's that high, given that even popular voice actors probably do not have a huge impact on sales numbers. I suspect that even prolific voice actors are far less compensated than people assume.

But that's just speculation on my part. I really have no clue.

 

[Juno]

Remember that they tried to explain Taylor not being in the game as “Various overlapping circumstances made it difficult for Hellena Taylor to reprise her role". Clearly, they were hoping people would assume it to be something innocent like scheduling conflicts and the story would go away. And then once Taylor spoke out, Kamiya basically called her a liar even though they themselves couldn't give an honest answer about what happened. I don't feel like Platinum has a lot of credibility in this.

 

[conchobhar]

Honestly? I have no context for what the pay scale looks like for top talent in voice acting. Hale is the best of the best at her job and obviously in demand enough that she has no trouble finding roles, but I don't know how much that translates into an increase over the base rate. 2x? 3x? 4x? I seriously doubt it's that high, given that even popular voice actors probably do not have a huge impact on sales numbers. I suspect that even prolific voice actors are far less compensated than people assume.

But that's just speculation on my part. I really have no clue.

I'm not particularly knowledgeable on how much voice actors tend to make, either, but I feel confident in assuming that it cost more to hire Jennifer Hale, one of the most experienced and prolific actors in the industry, than Helena Taylor. Not to the extent that some of the comments on the Kotaku article say (someone speculates she earned "north of 100K" for the role, and another said she can "name her own price", both of which are ludicrous), but definitely more than the base rate. I don't think Platinum broke the bank by getting Hale or anything, but if the goal here was just to save money… I can't imagine this was the cheapest option.

 

[Juno]

The real thing here is that we simply don't know how much voiced dialogue Bayonetta actually has in the game yet. I imagine after the game releases, somebody will crunch the numbers and that will give us an idea whether the offer is in line with what is typical.

One thing to keep in mind is that the trailers appear to show that there are multiple versions of Bayonetta in the game- if that means that there is far more dialogue to voice than the first 2 games, then that might explain Taylor feeling insulted by the offer.

 

[Purple]

It did occur to me to double check with a voice actress I know on the whole pay scale thing, whose take on it was that given that this is Nintendo, and she's done the voice for 2 previous games, "she probably wouldn't get a ton more, but 4k is looooow." Followed by a long discussion of the ups and downs of pay trends in the industry, a note on how being seen as "hard to work with" leads to major pay cuts, and how Jennifer Hale is generally a big advocate for fellow VAs and definitely not in a position to scab, so... I'm sticking with the working theory that Taylor did or said something not super healthy for her continued working relationship and is presently doubling down hardcore out of pure spite and/or trying to recruit a rabid supporter base before something comes to light.

But again with what information is currently available I am just 100% on team "this is not actually any of my business."

 

[lincolnic]

I record VO actors for video games as a regular part of my job. I don't have any more insight into this story than anyone else, but I might be able to provide some details about how much work would be involved for a game like this. For a AAA game in 2022, I can almost guarantee you that there's no way they'd get through all of her dialogue in the amount of time they'd get for paying her $4k. That's just over the union rate for two 4-hour sessions, which is a pretty standard block of time. Maybe they could've done that for the first Bayonetta game, but that came out in 2009. Games were smaller then, with less dialogue. There are plenty of games from 2009 whose entire scripts are shorter than the amount of dialogue one single character can have in the games I work on now.

I don't know anything about Taylor personally or professionally, but in my own opinion, it really sounds like Platinum decided they wanted to hire Jennifer Hale but were contractually obligated to offer the job to Taylor first (or something along those lines). If they gave Taylor a lowball offer and she said no, that would clear them to hire Hale (who's absolutely getting paid more, but I can't guess as to how much). The only thing that doesn't quite add up with that idea is if Platinum works with union actors, why would they be offering a flat rate instead of the union rate? To the best of my knowledge, you have to pay union actors the union rate, full stop. In any case, it doesn't really sound like we're getting the full story from either party here, so this is entirely speculation.

The real thing here is that we simply don't know how much voiced dialogue Bayonetta actually has in the game yet. I imagine after the game releases, somebody will crunch the numbers and that will give us an idea whether the offer is in line with what is typical.

This might happen, but I don't think a third party will be able to accurately determine how much studio time was used. It's not gonna be as simple as adding up the total time of Bayonetta's dialogue in the game, because that doesn't account for how much time it took in the VO sessions to get the right reads. Actors don't just deliver every line once and move on, you have to do multiple takes to get to a place where the director's happy. And that's just for in-game dialogue; for cutscenes you'd have to ADR all of their lines unless you had the actor on set performing the mocap (which doesn't seem to be the case for this game). That takes even longer, because not only do you have to get a good performance, but you have to be able to squeeze it into the timing that matches the set audio. For a main character, if they're good at ADR, I'd estimate you're probably looking at 30-60 minutes of work per cutscene (depending on length). But this can vary wildly, from actor to actor and scene to scene.

 

[estragon]

This all seems very unfortunate, even if there are elements that complicate the story. The way voice actors for localizations of Japanese media are so often treated as disposable is not good, and she did a lot to establish this character. I wish we could have a little more basic empathy for Taylor pending some much more concrete information either way. The speculation without evidence that she's covering up something scandalous and was let go for that reason is particularly uncharitable. There is almost certainly more to the story, but until that information surfaces let's not just make stuff up.

One thing to keep in mind is that the trailers appear to show that there are multiple versions of Bayonetta in the game- if that means that there is far more dialogue to voice than the first 2 games, then that might explain Taylor feeling insulted by the offer.

On this note, a very funny thing I've seen is a repeat of the "but I want to feel good about Purchasing Newest Entry in Franchise" type justifications that also surfaced with the voice actor change in MGS5, another game with new versions of an old character. In both cases, the Japanese voice actors remained the same, but fans nonetheless developed elaborate in-game lore reasons why the actor had to change that for some reason only applied to the English voice cast.

 

[Sarge]

I've seen takes on this all over the Twitterverse, and my opinion is that... I'm going to wait until we have more information. I hate jumping on the outrage bandwagon about anything these days until I know more. Hard to know who is in the wrong yet.

 

[Bongo]

Always make the thread.

 

[Violentvixen]

Oh and I've done all the recommended cleaning although I'll certainly give it another shot.

Well I decided that if something was already wrong with it I might as well do a riskier cleaning. Turned it completely off and turned our vacuum up to max while using some attachments that really got into the vent. Played it again later that day and while the fan is still loud the grinding noise is gone, so going to hold off on repairs for now I think.

 

[Juno]

Always make the thread.

I didn't want to make the thread for the game. I likely won't buy it because this situation feels too awkward for me, and in the event I don't, I would rather not leave people with the implicit suggestion that I'm endorsing the game by being the person who created the thread. If me posting this topic here is a problem I'm sorry, I didn't know where else to put it.

 

[Juno]

Also since this has come up- If Taylor's version of the story is accurate, it doesn't necessarily mean that Jennifer Hale knew about it when she accepted the role. It wouldn't be fair to her to assume any ill intent on her part.

 

[ShakeWell]

Yeah, I definitely don't blame Jennifer Hale at all here.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

Hale has a post about how she's under an NDA and can't talk more, but I doubt she was aware of the circumstances. You don't bring on a new contractor with a spiel about how the previous one turned down the rate.

 

[Purple]

So...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1582442770735562758

Apparently the actual offer was $4000 per recording session, not total. Bouncing the actual number of $20,000 off my VA friend, her estimation of how good a deal that was altered to "Oh. She's a fucking moron, then," and a note that the ammount she asked for, with yet another zero on it, is a pay offer no voice actor has ever come close to getting for this sort of thing.