Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - Of Hell and Witches
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4621 |
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I'm not even sure what to feel about the Bayonetta situation anymore. I absolutely support voice actors receiving better pay for their work and residuals, as I do for all of the creative staff on a project. I was completely behind Taylor based on what she originally said. But if it's true that she deliberately misrepresented the situation, and that the rate she was offered was the SAG-AFTRA standard for the sessions required, then that only serves to directly undermine the point she was trying to make. Now you're going to get a bunch of people reading the headlines and having the reaction, "They're just lying about not getting paid enough. Why should we care about them?" And that sucks.
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MagicPolly
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That's my main worry too. It felt like we were making progress in this kind of discussion between the JJK actors coming out about their rates and Billy Kametz, but now it feels like everything has been reset with "well you know, there was the Hellena Taylor situation" |
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mtza
Posts: 8 |
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Neo TWEWY: I'll probably pick this up… later.
Translation isn't something I talk about online because it's one of those subjects that has unfortunately been absorbed into the All-Consuming Culture War Hell Meat Grinder. But yeah, Square Enix tends to be guiltier than most when it comes to having translations that feel like they're trying to outsmart the original scripts. (Political changes are usually the minority of actual mistranslations, believe it or not.) I love Neo, but there were definitely a few times where I kinda thought, Yeah, if I ever replay this it needs to be in Japanese. The catch is that my Japanese isn't exactly up to par to actually play anything yet (besides Ghost Trick for some reason), so that'll probably be a year or two. Thankfully the Steam version includes a full Japanese language option! So that's a selling point. Bayonetta 3: Errrr. Is $15k (minimum!) paltry for a union gig? I know VAs aren't salaried employees — there can be pretty big gaps between jobs, so the numbers can be misleading. People were bringing up that Taylor only did 4 sessions for Bayonetta 2 so therefore $4k for 4 days' work at $1k a day was fine or something, and that seems like a good example of that. But $3~4k isn't just higher than she said it was: It's pretty in line with SAG-AFTRA's rate for Weekly Performers (Source here, under On-Camera Performers), which is the highest rate listed on the wage table. (Assuming it's per session; if I'm misreading this, don't hesitate to tell me.) She's of course allowed and should be encouraged to advocate for higher wages if she thinks she's being undervalued even at that rate, but I don't think Platinum are paying her peanuts here. (Edit: After thinking about it for literally two seconds, wouldn't VAs be off-camera performers? In that case, Platinum blew the union rates out of the water. My point still stand no matter what VAing falls under, though.) On Kamiya… I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, I can't help but feel like people kind of talk about him blocking people like he somehow ran away from criticism like a coward because he refused to engage in fair debate in The School of Athens against @doritoGobler69. Which… no…? It's twitter dot com, not a courtroom; dude isn't compelled to deal with you if he doesn't want to, especially given he's a public figure. On the other hand, his tendency to make blocking people his "shtick" is… less successful, I think. Kamiya seems like a level-headed enough dude whenever he's not online, but he tends to maybe have a bit too much fun with it when he is. And yeah — it is fun when we're all dunking on people that are tweeting at him for obviously stupid reasons, but 99% of the time, it seems like a way to make quick enemies and not much else. I think that the response to him on twitter was bluntly, wildly out of proportion at the very least, but even I'm not going to act like he didn't deserve to get dunked on for "I WARNED YOU" and stuff like that. (Oh, and he deleted his twitter account for a while, it wasn't removed.) td;lr: on Kamiya: Should've just tapped the sign and then started silently blocking people instead of making it into a big spectacle and himself look like a mustache-twirling cartoon villain.[/i] |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 525 |
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The thing about Taylor is that even if she did lie about what they offered her, she's absolutely within her right to kvetch about it. $15K is only a lot of money in the context of video game voice acting; for any other context, it's rather paltry. Platinum has nailed being able to the situation even though they're the ones who were dishonest to fans about what happened. They could have told fans it was a pay dispute that kept them from recasting Taylor. They very pointedly didn't. |
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Yttrbio
 Posts: 3653 |
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Everyone's within their rights to kvetch about things. She called for a boycott, which is not the same thing, and makes it harder to shrug off "even if she did lie."
And under no circumstances should Platinum have said it was a pay dispute, at least before Taylor started making statements. Can you imagine if, every time you turned down a job, the potential employer would tell other employers that you ask for more money than they thought you were worth? I'm still trying to track down the original lie that people say Platinum made about why they didn't cast her. "Scheduling conflicts" seems to have been invented from nowhere. I've seen "overlapping circumstances," which is just a mealy-mouthed "because reasons," but that's what companies should say when they don't hire someone, rather than getting into specifics. |
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DKL
 Posts: 1956 Location: California, USA |
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This is probably the last time I comment on the topic. I normally prefer lurking and to see what ideas people come up with, if only to prevent myself from putting my foot in my mouth, but I just had to stop that because I couldn't believe what was going on surrounding this topic.
I spent the entirety of my work week as a tax accountant gathering data, but mostly because outlets reporting on this thing couldn't be bothered to, so I'm absolutely tired. I've come to the realization that games journalism is probably very hard, so people that do it right deserve to be held up. That said, can we PLEASE view Kamiya's twitter in context? 
Imagine getting messages like the above for several years just because Platinum didn't put Bayonetta 2, a game Kamiya didn't even actually direct, on your favorite box. For more context, here is someone from games journalism (Imran Kahn, who apparently left corpo games journalism... I wouldn't be surprised if it was because of incidents somewhat like this) who actually waited before mashing his keyboard and details how accessible Kamiya used to be on twitter before people decided to be stupid: https://www.patreon.com/posts/everything-once-73616074?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan I'm looking through Kamiya's timeline and it seems to be this one tweet, as far as I can tell because I can't speak Japanese, where people have decided he's an ugly money bag whose mother left him because he sucks: https://twitter.com/PG_kamiya/status/1581316361657102337?s=20&t=XQ7SFOfc1svNGfJWaiXrww This is absolutely tepid, ESPECIALLY in context of his history on the platform, compared to the inflammatory videos Taylor put out where she called for a boycott and called Jennifer Hale, a very vocal supporter of voice acting rights, "New Girl". Based on what I could piece together from the Reset Era thread discussing the Jason Schreier article, Kamiya, SOMEONE WHOSE PRIMARY LANGUAGE IS NOT ENGLISH, has "rules" because there is so much harassment that gets thrown his way, primarily from English speakers. He even supposedly has a bot that helps manage things and one thing its supposedly told to do is to block (most?) English posts. He supposedly had to adjust the sensitivity of the bots in response to all the harassment and he warned people in Japanese that they might get clipped even though they are innocent and are following the rules. (thinking about it in context... I think he meant to say "Be aware of my rules," but I'm not sure) I don't know how accurate this is, but it's what I've got based on what people who seemed to have actually followed the thing closely are saying. If someone else followed closely (as in followed the saga on his Twitter account 1st hand as opposed to refencing reports of it, which all seem to just bring up that one tweet from above), feel free to chime in since my ability to follow this was limited, either because I can't speak Japanese or because other tweets have been deleted... I've seen a post of him supposedly referencing the $15,000, but it's not there in his timeline anymore. So, even with the above in mind, can we still reasonably conclude he's a dick? Maybe. I'll let people decide. But can we at least consider the above while dunking on the man with our clever one-liners? |
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wolf10
 Posts: 907 |
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As a book I should not have read in middle school taught me: "People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool." ("Wizard's First Rule," Goodkind, 1994) Leaving the year on the citation because god damn if the man didn't anticipate Twitter. Kamiya's situation is why I will never have an account there, even if some miracle happens and I make it big. I put my foot in my mouth enough in this backwoods anime forum, imagine having my nonsense on blast to the entire human race? (Right now his feed seems to be a bunch of Japanese fans posting screenshots of their Bayonetta 3 preorders and otherwise distracting him form the elephant in the room. It's a very Japanese response to the situation. I don't really have the energy to sleuth further.) But back to lighter topics...
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Top Gun
Posts: 4621 |
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Even if Taylor had every right to make a complaint, I think you do have to be a bit careful about how the argument is framed. A lot of your average gamers out there will look at the original offer and think, "This person could have made a substantial fraction of my entire yearly salary by doing a game character's voice for a few days." And if you put aside all of the complications and extenuating circumstances and everything else, for the vast majority of the people on the planet, $15K for something like 15-20 hours of work is a lot of money. Even as someone who absolutely supports actors getting fair pay, I still can't stop myself from thinking, "Gee, that would be nice..." My point is that if you want to get the support of Joe Q. Public for an issue like this, you need to make sure that you're engendering sympathy, and a lot of that comes from how the issue is presented.
Thank you for posting this; the author seems to have laid everything out in a nuanced manner. If what he says is accurate, then I probably owe Kamiya an apology at least. I wasn't aware of some of the foul behavior he's had directed at him in the past. |
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yeehaw
 Posts: 451 |
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I don't know much about video game masters, is this normal? I know old anime and movies are easily lost because they're physical, but I'd imagine video games are files and so easier to copy and store? How'd they lose them? |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1822 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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The files could be on obsolete physical media that can no longer be read. Not everyone backs up files to currently-supported media formats. Digital media used to be very expensive. |
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King Chicken
 Posts: 96 |
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I haven't seen Kamiya do anything wrong, personally. People seem to just be upset he doesn't put up with the usual Twitter crap like other people do. For the average fanboy begging for a port of Bayonetta 2 some people might applaud, but then there's the voice actors and games journalists who expect to be worshipped as royalty and get upset when he treats them like any other idiot on social media and then take that as a sign Kamiya has Gone Too Far. And given how the whole situation turned out, he was vindicated. All the Twitter activists, voice actors and journalists who rushed to attack and demand answers from him are eating some large-sized crow right now as more information comes to light. |
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puggles
Posts: 16 |
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Are you saying they're fighting the good fight to make society better by adding in stupid political lines to a video game translation? ...... No, this isn't some grand crusade to better the world, it's just a localizer being annoying and disrespectful to make a work fit their own worldview. For people who often promote socialism and communism you would think they would be right on board with the little guy seizing the means of distribution away from the big companies by providing free fan translations of products to people seeking them. Seems more like it's about controlling a piece of media and ensuring only the translator's filtered version is the only version people can experience and know of. |
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AsuraTheDestructor
Posts: 469 |
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Hellena Taylor Finally responded, and, well......
https://twitter.com/hellenataylor/status/1584415390171480066 Instead of trying to disprove the Jason Schreier Article, she not only inadverdantly proves itright, but the 6 figure sum she asked for plus residuals was revealed by her as well. 250,000 dollars? What?! Thats [expletive] crazy, and she actually believes the series has made 450 million in revenue by taking the overall sales of the game at face value, not understanding the various discounts that happen with the game or that not all copys of the game sold are 60 dollars. Yeah, I'm sorry, but there are other VA stories to rally around for better VA pay, Hellena Taylor is a deliberate lier at this point. I can't defend her. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4470 |
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Her tweet says that it was not $250,000, but she also didn't say how much she wanted. Leaving things vague has not worked out well here since the more we find out, the more we see that what was and was not included in her statements is meant to look a certain way. $4,000 was initially revealed as all she was offered for all of Bayonetta 3. On its own, that sounded pretty low, but it left out how much time was involved. People guessed based on prior interviews about Bayonetta 2 that it would probably take a comparable amount of time, and that it was right around the union standard. Not necessarily great, but also not as bad as initially implied. Now, we find out that she was, indeed, offered $4,000 for the whole game because her role was reduced to a cameo. There is a lot of detail missing between what that last offer was and how it got there. She did come back to that $450 million number again, and so far, nobody has been able to figure out where she got that. Nothing was cited as a source, anything that has been reported about sales indicates the series has not done nearly that well. Not to mention that Sega ended up shopping it around for a publishing partner after the first game, which it wouldn't do if it sold well. I also think that the companies involved would crow about its success if it did do well. Considering that twice now she has pointed to that to say that what she was offered was a pittance, it seems pretty relevant to know where that is coming from. I doubt that a contracted voice actor would be privy to that information, yet she seems confident about it. Was she counting Smash sales since Bayonetta is in it? It's a stretch to attribute much of those sales to one character, but I can't think of anything else. It would be a shame if some of this was because she went into it with bad information. |
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AQuin1904
Posts: 266 |
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The idea that a throwaway line given to a graffiti artist represents the translator or editor's "worldview" or a promotion of the sentiment in question is absurd. If you don't like punch-ups, that's fine; neither do I. But leave grifts like this "culture wars" shit at the door. Beyond that, are you seriously going to pretend that modern SE localizations don't get oversight? This isn't some company that licenses out properties and then lets an outside team have a field day. SE hires in-house translation and editing staff in multiple languages through their main office in Japan and keeps a close eye on anything they contract out. Like it or not, this is the direction they've actively been pushing in for decades with flourishes like all the faux medievalisms they insert into their fantasy releases, not some rogue outsider stomping all over the original text. By the way, fan translations are often even more guilty of errors and rewrites (including inserting new jokes, like this SE TL, completely missing jokes in the JP, totally changing the way someone speaks to match a movie they like, and replacing banter with political diatribes). People like you just take it on faith that they're more genuine. And in this case, you don't even have a fan translation to champion—just a collection of twitter and forum posts that mostly consist of failing to parse the tone of Japanese lines, complaints about turning diminutive honorifics into nicknames, and the tried and true "some information in these sentences now appears in a slightly different order." The ideal of one-to-one translation is always going to be impossible, since translators either have to get creative to render linguistic features that don't exist in their target language (TLing from Japanese, keigo is the poster child for this; most people's idea of a "literal" translation can't even distinguish between 食う and 召し上がる or だぜ and ですわ), so the only way you will ever get an "unfiltered" version of any text is by reading in the original language. Even then, your cultural context and individual circumstances mean that you will always have a unique experience, probably missing meanings that the author intended and seeing others that they did not. |
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