 Hey everyone, so I have an update I want to make on the Bayonetta 3 situation. For those that are unaware, voice actor Helena Taylor came out and called for a boycott of Bayonetta 3 over the weekend, essentially claiming that she had insulting offers for salary. The final offer was $4,000 for the entire game, which did sound a little low, however it kind of came out that maybe it would only be about 16 hours of work and that's right around union rates because she's part of a union. And look, people were kind of not really happy that she called for the boycott, although some could agree that maybe the pay should be higher. She also said that Jennifer Hale, the current voice actor for Bayonetta 3, does not have any rights to be that character and sign autographs as that character because she felt that she owned that character, which also seemed to rub people the wrong way. But at the core of this, of course, was her complaints about being offered what she called a pitiful rate of pay and a non-livable wage, which was quite interesting. People dug into her past and realized she hasn't actually been doing any voiceover work in eight years, so there's that while Jennifer Hale is obviously one of the biggest names in voice acting both in anime, TV and obviously video games. Well a new article came out here by Jason Schreyer over on Bloomberg that shed some possible light on this from multiple sources that she might have been lying through her teeth and actually was being extremely unreasonable, but we're gonna go with what Jason Schreyer said here because he is not someone who beats around the bush when it comes to this and he is well known to stand up for employees during contract and labor disputes. So here is what he said. So a tense pay dispute overshadowed Nintendo's upcoming Bayonetta 3 by Jason Schreyer posted today. A pay dispute between the creator of a critically acclaimed video game series and its star voice actor reignited a long simmering debate over wages in the industry. As is often the case in these sorts of disagreements, the details surrounding negotiations and casting for the upcoming Bayonetta 3 are more complicated than what's been portrayed publicly. The feud spilled out into the open over the weekend when Helena Taylor, the star of the first two Bayonetta games, said she would not appear in the next iteration set to be released on the Nintendo Switch on October 28th. She posted a series of videos Saturday on Twitter accusing Nintendo Company and the game's developer, Platinum Games, of offering her a total of $4,000 to reprise her role. She said she rejected the lowball offer and asked fans to refrain from buying the game. If you're someone who cares about people, who cares about the world around you, who cares about who gets hurt with these financial decisions, then I urge you to boycott this game, Taylor said in one of the videos. The videos went viral, racking up more than 9.5 million views on Twitter. Taylor's story touched a nerve among gamers. Voice actors are beloved by fans, but failed to command anywhere close to what a Hollywood actor makes. Game actors have long complained of being underpaid and underappreciated. Some have said they receive little information about their roles until the show up in the recording booth. The industry operates in such clandestine ways that actors sometimes won't even know what game they're recording lines for until it's released. The tension that lasted crested during contract negotiations in 2016 when the union representing many voice actors, the screen actors guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists orchestrated a strike that lasted nearly a year. One of the sticking points was residuals, meaning compensating for actors when sales of a game outperform expectation. Voice actors gave up that fight in exchange for receiving bonuses based on the number of sessions they work. In the case of Bayonetta 3, the developer appeared to be determined to rehire Taylor, according to two people familiar with the negotiations, as well as documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. So there's actual documented proof here, not just people talking. Here's where their accounts differ. Platinum Games sought to hire Taylor for at least five sessions, each paying $3,000 to $4,000 for four hours in the studio. Said the people who asked not to be identified because they aren't authorized to discuss private contract negotiations. It's NDA territory, right? That would make for a total of the game of at least $15,000. That's obviously the low end, someone would be $4,000, so it could be closer to $20,000. Either way, it's a lot higher than the initial $4,000 that Taylor presented forward. In response, they said Taylor asked for a six-figure sum as well as residuals on the game. Platinum declined, and following lengthy negotiations, took auditions for a new actor. Platinum later offered Taylor a cameo in the game for a fee of one session, which she turned down, the people said. In an email, Taylor described this account as an absolute lie, and said Platinum was trying to save their ass and the game. She said she stood by everything she said in the video, and I would like to put this whole bloody franchise behind me, quite frankly, and get on with my life in the theater, she wrote. Representatives for Platinum Games and Nintendo didn't respond to requests for comment. Hideki Kamiya, the executive director of Bayonetta 3, also called Taylor's allegations sad and deplorable in a Twitter post. So what did we get here? Taylor's sticking by her guns and saying that, hey, this stuff's a lie. They're lying. They have reasons to lie. They're lying. Multiple sources, Breaking NDA to give this information to Jason Schreyer, and they have actual documentation that they verified going over all this. This is important to note because obviously, this has turned into a massive deal in the industry, because the rate that she originally set was $4,000 for the whole game, and they came back and are basically saying, no, it was $4,000 for a cameo session. As we know, according to the trailers for Bayonetta 3, sorry if this upsets people, the OG Bayonetta dies early in the game, and we saw this in the actual trailers. This isn't a leak. This is in the official media that the OG Bayonetta dies. So the cameo was likely for that original Bayonetta character that she was voicing this whole time. They said, hey, look, we couldn't get you to agree to come on for the whole game because you were asking for six figures. To put this in perspective, that's more than the game director makes. I want to make this clear. The salaries for employees that develop and direct games in Japan are anywhere from $30,000 to $80,000, depending on what role you have. And yes, these are livable wages in Japan, by the way, we're not talking about this being some sort of you're living on the street wages. But what's interesting is that those are wages that employees get for an entire year's worth of work. And Helena Taylor was asking for that level of work in, say, you know, 20 to 25 hours of actual work. She wanted that level of pay, if not higher, plus incentives. And it's possible they would have been willing to give bonuses on sales, but they definitely weren't going to hand over a six figure salary to somebody who's basically doing what amounts to less than one week worth of work on the game. And I understand that obviously voice actors out there want to be treated like Hollywood actors, but Hollywood actors are obviously a little different. Oftentimes, as an example, when you get a voice actor, that's a Hollywood actor. And like for the Mario movie, Chris Pratt probably got paid millions for the lines he read one. It was probably more than a week's worth of lines he had to read, probably more than four to five sessions, because it's the main character in an actual movie that has a lot of talking. On top of that, they are paying that kind of money for the name, the name that person made in a different profession where they were actually on screen performing. So there is a difference in how that is done, and companies obviously put a value on the name being attached to the movie. Helena Taylor's name doesn't really boost Bayonetta III's sales by having her name attached, because she hasn't been active in the voice acting community in a long time, and even having Jennifer Hale, who is one of the best voice actors for females in the entire industry doing this. Yeah, it's not something that I think Jennifer Hale is sitting there being someone who's gonna boost sales of the game on her own. Like voice actors just don't get the same sort of notoriety as people who are on screen that you physically see and performing in major roles in movies. So that's just the way it is. The job of an actor versus a voice actor is different, and unfortunately for voice actors, when you're an actor that gets hired to do some voice acting, you tend to get the benefit of your acting career with your salaries. I know that it's kind of BS and it's dumb, but what appears to have happened here, and this is obviously just based on Bloomberg's reporting, is that Helena Taylor lied, not only lied about the amount of money that she was initially offered, she lied a little bit about the final offer, because she said final offer for the whole game when it was final offer for one session, $4,000 for one session, that, by the way guys, would have been one four hour session at $1,000 per hour, and you're gonna be very hard pressed to find anyone out there, voice actors included that would think that that is somehow a bad rate. Now, I am guessing that Jennifer Hale probably took a three to five, maybe even a $6,000 per session offer to do the entire game, I would assume that's pretty high rates in voice acting, and yes, folks, this is literally 20 to 25 hours worth of work, and especially if you include the tryouts in there, so yeah, I would safe to say that that's, most people are gonna say that's a pretty damn good salary. I understand that people wanna make millions, and yes, actors do factually make millions, but that's because the actors sell the movie. Actors that aren't A-listers don't make that kind of money per movie. In fact, if you go watch a lot of indie movies, there's a lot of actors in there that are only making $5,000 to $10,000 for the entire movie, because that's just what it is. That's just the way it goes. You don't make the big bucks unless you're an A-lister, and Helena Taylor's not even an A-lister in the voice acting community, so it's just something to consider. She's obviously really upset about this. She's gotten a lot of support, but she's also gotten a lot of backlash as well, and I don't think she was prepared for the amount of backlash. I think she thought it would be a universal, where you're right, good job standing up for everyone, and instead there's been a lot of questioning about her career and her motives, and firing back that she was asking for six figures for a week of work is gonna rub people the wrong way, no matter which way you slice it. So of course she wants to deny and call it a lie, and I mean, the bottom line is if they have a documentation showing the contract, and she already broke NDA anyways, she could also show her the contract as well, because I'm sure she has a copy of it. If she doesn't have a copy of the contract, then she's got nothing to back up her claims, whereas Bloomberg has a copy of the contract, and the contract offer, it seems to show that Taylor was lying. Now it's possible that this was all leaked, and this is one elaborate hoax to the Gray Taylor, and if that is ever found out to be the case, then Platinum Games and Nintendo are gonna be in some deep water for falsifying documentations to slander somebody else. But in the moment, evidence actually being supplied, it kinda looks like Helena Taylor might have actually been making some stuff up to make herself sound better, and had actually been asking for a significant chunk of money that doesn't really equate to the work being asked for. Anyways, folks, I am Nathaniel Rumpeljant from Nintendo Prime. You guys let me know what you think about this very sticky situation down in the comments below. I honestly, this is something that is so far out of my depth that I'm not really sure what to do other than just give you guys what's being reported, and you guys tell me what you think. Catch you guys in the next video.