Game News 2.0

If I were to play devil's advocate, her CV reads like a bit of a jobber actress with some very minor background roles as one off side characters in a few games and TV shows, before landing the acting role for the main character in an English translation of an at the time unknown Japanese game from a newly formed development studio (I'm aware of the previous pedigree of key people at the studio, but they were nevertheless just getting started as a team), which turned out to be a hit thanks primarily to the gameplay and visual design. She's had no other major role since and has been riding that gravy train for a few years but now finds that the train looks like it's going to continue to run just fine without her.

I've always felt that voice actors tend to overestimate their worth when it comes to games. There's probably a good 100 people who are far more important to the success of a game like Bayonetta, from designers to artists to programmers to writers. There are certain types of more narrative focussed games where acting work is more integral but this probably isn't one of them. Swap out the voice and the game probably would have been pretty much the same. Swap out one or two coders or level designers who's names you don't even know and it might have been vastly less polished or accomplished.

There's also absolutely no context here for what she was asked to do for the 4k. They've replaced her with Jennifer Hale who is a far more prolific voice actress and won't have accepted a low ball offer.

I'm just glad they are finally announcing something so the non-stop 'insider' leaks of the last 2 years can finally stop.

Indeed. I can guarantee that Colleen O'Shaughnessy made exponentially more money voicing Tails in the 2 Sonic movies than she did in all the times she played him in games combined and with a lot less booth time required. I'm sure that pay check still would have had 3 less zeroes than Ben Schwartz or Idris Elba.

It's that old thing of you don't pay an artist to paint a picture you pay them for the talent they developed over hundreds of hours to be able to paint the picture you can't.

Yeah but acting is critically important to a movie and can make or break the whole project. For many games it's a very distant minor concern behind gameplay, design, performance, stability, art style and graphic quality. All of these things come from a huge team of talented designers, programmers, artists, writers, qa etc. almost all of whom don't get to build a profile, don't get to claim sole ownership of the character, and don't get to stamp their feet and call for boycotts if they're not called up to work on the sequel like this voice actor did.

There are games where the quality of the acting matters. The likes of The Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption come to mind. But Bayonetta and Sonic are not that type of game. Even the likes of Final Fantasy is massively narrative driven and gets by with pretty terrible voice acting.

Salaries are not based purely on talent or on how hard the work you do is in any industry. They're based on supply and demand, how important your skill actually is in the given environment and whether someone else could do the exact same job for less without impacting the quality of the output. Replacing a voice artist won't impact the overall quality of most (not all) games. Replacing a voice artist massively changes a movie however.

To give a different example, while voice actors earn more in movies than in games, 3D artists earnings are much more comparable (hard to find hard data but there are polls indicating games pay more) because their contribution holds similar importance in both industries.

They can end up being pretty substantial part of a character, David Hayter as solid snake I remember being a big deal when he didn't get a chance to reprise his role in the MGS series. It was a pretty iconic voice and he said he really stretched himself doing old snake in MGS4.

I do kinda feel bad for him as it's not often people really get to put a stamp on like that.

Not sure we’ll ever know the full story. Money obviously isn’t an issue, you can be sure JH is getting more than $4k - is it possible they didn’t want her for the third game but maybe have considered themselves contractually obliged to offer her a contract first?

Or she overplayed her hand in negotiations and they ended up walking away - but I’d be surprised if this was the case, if it came out that she misrepresented the contract she was offered she might find it difficult to find work again.

I could see it both ways - it could be arse covering, but she could also have easily overestimated her value to the project - especially if she’s been given sketchy profit info for the previous games(450m seems incredibly high). It looks like she doesn’t do much VA anyway, her last credit is 8 years ago.

Regardless it’s probably a good thing for the industry to have pay practices in public discourse.

And of all those examples you've given that would cause a detrimental change the only ones that haven't been recast at some stage are Marcus Fenix, Master Chief and Cortana.

T.C Carson was recast as Kratos, David Hayter was recast as Snake, Michael Ironside was recast as Sam Fisher and the Kevin Conroy/ Mark Hamill duo were recast as Batman/Joker in Arkham Origins.

Jennifer hale was already doing a lot of voices for the game, a lot of minor stuff and apparently a big one.