Hellena Taylor, who voiced the character Bayonetta in the games of the same name, called for a boycott of the third episode. She was replaced there.
” I understand that boycotting a game is a personal choice, and there are some who won’t. And that’s normal. But, if you are someone who cares about others, the world around you, and those who are hurting due to financial decisions, then I encourage you to boycott this game writes Hellena Taylor in a series of tweets published on October 15, 2022. This actress calls for a boycott of video games Bayonetta 3which will be available on October 28 on Nintendo Switch.
She is after the PlatinumGames studio, which would have offered her only a fee of $4,000 to take over the role of Bayonetta, the heroine to whom she lent her voice in the first two adventures. In the third opus, she is therefore replaced by Jennifer Hale (heard in the Mass Effect). On October 5, in the columns of GameInformer, director Yusuke Miyata justified this choice as follows: “ Several overlapping circumstances prevented Hellena Taylor from reprising her role without going into details.
$4,000 to play a heroine in a video game?!
Hellena Taylor obviously accuses PlatinumGames of lacking transparency on the reasons that prompted him to replace her with Jennifer Hale. She confesses: The Bayonetta saga generated around $450 million, not including merchandising. As an actress, I trained for 7 and a half years […]. Did they think it wasn’t worth it? They only offered me $4,000 for the entire game. It’s an insult to me, for how long I’ve worked, for what I’ve given to this game and to the fans. “She explains that she asked” a living wage “when she received a response” legal “, sure, but ” immoral “.
His call for a boycott serves a cause much larger than himself. She intends to be the spokesperson for those who are not paid up to their talent. ” It affects mental health. I was so worried about ending up on the street. It terrified me to the point of having suicidal thoughts “, she admits, not hiding her sobs. Bryan Dechartwho notably lent his voice to Connor in the video game Detroit: Become Humansupported his colleague: “ For those who are curious, this happened to me too. I was taken on to play an important character in a big project developed by a studio that has made lots of games. He refused to register the project with SAG-AFTRA and offered me $4,000 for the whole game. »
According to this grid from the SAG-AFTRA union (which represents approximately 160,000 talents in the United States), a dubber must be paid $451 per hour. We doubt that PlatinumGames would have solicited Hellena Taylor for only nine hours for the main role of Bayonetta 3a large-scale project.
Targeted by Hellena Taylor, Hideki Kamiya, one of the creators of Bayonetta, first split a lunar response on Twitter : “ It is sad and deplorable for this lie. That’s all I can say now. Then he completely deactivated his account… A strange, even suspicious behavior, given the scale of the problem.