Enlarge / If you want me to talk, you need to provide a much more valuable bauble...
Voice actress Hellena Taylor caused a bit of a social media firestorm over the weekend, calling for players to boycott the upcoming Bayonetta 3 over what she called an "insulting" and "immoral" low payment offer to reprise her role as the title character. And while reports have disputed some of the specifics of Taylor's allegations, that he-said-she-said drama obscures just how little power video game voice actors have to demand a higher share of the revenues from best-selling titles.
The barest sliver of the pie
Earlier this month, Bayonetta 3 director Yusuke Miyata cited "various overlapping circumstances [that] made it difficult for Hellena Taylor to reprise her role," in an interview with Game Informer. But Taylor, in an October 15 Twitter video message that has been viewed over 9 million times as of this writing, alleges that she was offered a "buyout" price of just $4,000 to once again play Bayonetta for the upcoming game. That's a rate Taylor said was "an insult to me, the amount of time that I took to work on my talent and everything that I have given to this game and to the fans."
"I didn't want the world, I didn't ask for too much. I was just asking for a decent, dignified living wage," Taylor said, urging viewers to boycott the game and use the money to donate to charities instead. "What they did was legal but it was immoral."
Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments