I have spent a few weeks talking to video-game voice actors, the real humans who bring verve and humour to our gaming experiences. Some of them have won major awards for their work. None of them have had a meaningful pay rise in over 10 years, despite the industry’s exponential growth. They are furious – and they have every right to be.
Over the weekend, Hellena Taylor, who played the lead character in Bayonetta, Platinum Games’ stylish action series about a hypersexualised angel-killing witch who fights with extreme flair, went public with her frustrations. She says she was offered just $4,000 (£3,500) to reprise her role in the third game, out this month. In a series of videos she urged fans to boycott Bayonetta 3, and she has spoken about how being underpaid and overworked has affected her mental health. “I didn’t want the world. I didn’t ask for too much,” she said. “I was just asking for a decent, dignified, living wage.”
These videos are difficult to watch. Taylor claims she even went to the head of Platinum Games, Hideki Kamiya, and was still not given a fair offer. (My colleague Alex Hern reported that, so far, neither Nintendo or Platinum Games has responded. Hideki, meanwhile, who is famously bellicose on social media, wrote on Twitter not long after Taylor’s allegation: “sad and deplorable about the attitude of untruth. That’s what all I can tell now.”)
Shockingly, Taylor’s experience is not uncommon. Bryan Dechart, who starred in Detroit: Become Human, wrote on Twitter that he too was once offered $4,000 to work on an entire game. It is not easy work: lead roles in games involve dozens of hours of recording, and often the fees don’t cover travel, or even lunch.
“In contrast to screen actors, video game actors come into the room with little or no information about the project, before they are expected to give a naturalistic and nuanced performance … by reading a script off a spreadsheet they’ll have been lucky to have received the evening before,” one longstanding game performer told me. “Players expect the same experience in games as when they watch a film, and people are winning Baftas for their work in games. But the industry still doesn’t see the actor and their work as something to think about until the very end of the process. All game actors want is fair working practices and a fair wage.”
John Schwab, who plays the bard Dandelion in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, said he sympathised with Taylor. “You get a few thousand pounds to play a lead character, and then that video game makes $700m. How does that make you feel, when you’ve created the role?” Schwab is one of many game voiceover actors in the UK who, like the performing artists’ union Equity, have been trying for years to negotiate better pay and conditions. Their efforts have been met with obfuscation and resistance from the outsourcing companies that largely control the voiceover market, acting as middle-men between developers and talent.
In reporting this story (keep an eye on the Guardian this week to read more) I was struck by the lack of transparency and absence of good faith that was shown towards performers and the vital role that they play in a game’s success. Some people say they work on games without ever even knowing which game it is, and are bound by NDAs and project code names; sometimes they’re taken by surprise when a game is released and their voice features in it.
Speaking out comes with potential consequences, but many actors have had enough. “We have no governing body that might confront an outsource studio for what is essentially dishonesty and manipulation,” said one high-profile video game actor, who wants to remain anonymous. “We are not looking for a bigger piece of the pie. We’re just looking to maintain what we’ve got, with the hope of small increases to accommodate inflation.” Don’t the people who bring our games to life at least deserve that?
What to read
Speaking of performers, I spoke with the cast and director of Immortality – a game that’s taken up permanent residence in my brain, and one so complex and mysterious that even its actors couldn’t figure out how it was going to work. I greatly enjoyed speaking to everyone involved in this game.
This guy uses household objects to create pretend reload animations. Fascinating.
Oh dear, Meta’s flagship Horizon metaverse is almost deserted, the Wall Street Journal reports. Murder Village is so quiet there’s nobody to murder. There are no hot girls in the Hot Girl Summer Rooftop Pool Party. This WSJ story on Mark Zuckerberg’s underperforming virtual world is full of gold: “The next day, a male Journal reporter visited a ‘house party’ in which he was one of two people in attendance … The other avatar never spoke and the game ended after about 10 minutes. The reporter’s avatar later fell into the pool and couldn’t figure out how to get out. There was no one around to help.”
Horror aficionados of the PlayStation 2 era will be delighted to learn that the Silent Hill series is coming back. Konami will spill the details this Wednesday at 10pm BST.
What to play
A Plague Tale: Requiem is out this week. Here’s our reviewer Rick Lane’s take on this medieval sort-of-horror game about a plague of rats (and sequel to a surprise 2018 hit): “Throughout its running-time, Requiem treads a fine line between poignant and absurd, balancing heartbreaking scenes in which Hugo wrestles with burdens no child should ever bear, with action sequences where you must flee from literal tsunamis of rats. But even at its most ridiculous, Requiem is always earnest in its ideas. Ultimately, it’s a game about living with incurable illness, the constant daily struggle, the threat of outside circumstances making it worse, the importance of hope, and the sad truth that, sometimes, there is none to be had.”
Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox Series S/X
Approximate time to play: 15-20 hours
What to click
Mario and Rabbids: Sparks of Hope review – decent strategy game in flimsy Nintendo wrapping
Meet the people who play job sims of their own careers
Scorn review – horror puzzler is a revulsive but rewarding nightmare
Potionomics review – colourful adventures in magical capitalism
Question block
Before I jump into a new query, I wanted to share this response from reader Sam to last week’s question about what you’d track with a real-life stat tracker: “If I could track one pointless stat it would probably be how many times I check everything before I leave the house (the oven, the taps, the plug switches, the door handle) to see what habits, if any, seem to lessen my double-checking obsessions. But that would probably make the situation worse, so I’ll opt for tracking how many dogs I’ve smiled at instead.”
On to this week’s query, from reader Kateland: I’m a huge Stardew Valley fan, and I’ve been trying to find a farming simulator with a similar vibe. I’ve tried many other games in this genre, but none of them resonate with me the way Stardew does. I’ve never lost sleep in the Portia mines or been emotionally invested in a fruit tree in Grow. Should I resign myself to replaying Stardew yet again (not the worst fate) while waiting for Haunted Chocolatier to be released?
Forgive me for what might seem like an obvious suggestion, but have you tried the OG of farming games, Harvest Moon? It was Stardew Valley’s inspiration. When I was about eight, I read a review of this adorable Japanese farming game in one of my Nintendo magazines and I was obsessed with it for the next 20 years. I played it to death on the SNES, various Game Boys and the GameCube – I even bought a Japanese copy of the N64 version when I was a student in Japan. Years ago, I interviewed its creator Yasuhiro Wada, who said he’d largely created the games to “convey the goodness of rural life”.
Sadly, there was some argy-bargy over the intellectual property rights to Harvest Moon, and the modern games that bear that name are quite bad. Now the original developer makes farming games called Story of Seasons instead. If you don’t fancy playing the older Harvest Moon games, I’d recommend Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town. Its presentation is a bit lacking, but it has plenty of heart and soul.
• This story was amended on 18 October 2022 to correct the name of the actor, John Schwab, who plays Dandelion in The Witcher 3.
