https://www.ign.com/articles/bayonetta-3-voice-actors
IGN wrote an article about some of the things that have been discussed about voice actor pay that came up after the initial wave of stuff with Bayonetta.
The market for English voice actors seems insanely oversaturated, in that there are too many voice actors for how much work there is to go around. This is probably true of America just by itself, but if you need English voice actors, you can pool from talents in multiple countries around the world for English, not just America.
Some might see the numbers from Taylor, the "$4k" and "$15k", and think, "Wow, that's a lot for 4 days of work". IGN commenters certainly think that the actual $15k figure and also the $250 / hr union rate means VAs should get bent, but I feel like those are the words of a person who has never actually worked a day in their life, is unemployed to begin with, has never done anything creative, and/or has never done any kind of gig work. Cause "$250/hr (pre-tax and pre-union dues) for infrequent gig work is living the life" seems like a fucking stupid conclusion to make. If everyone is trying to get the same few roles, then only a handful of people per year are actually going to get these top billing, leading roles. It's not like you wake up and get paid $1k every day for 4 hours of work, nor are you landing roles that pay $15k every other week.
The situation Sean Chiplock described that's printed in the IGN article seems pretty shitty. It seems rather, "Hey, you're here for an hour, so do these bit voices too, you're getting paid anyway". Chiplock talks about the kinda, idk, unseen physical aspect of the job. It might sound like an overly first world problem. On the other hand, I sure can't imagine talking for 4 hours on demand lmao. I believe it was Barret's English FF7 Remake voice actor who mentioned in the Reddit AMA that in order to do the stairs part, the director had them run in place in the studio to actually make them winded so it sound realistic... Did they still have to record more after that...?
Japan tackles voice actor payment quite differently than America. Solid Snake's JP voice actor, Akio Otsuka, has talked about voice actor pay before in depth - voice actors are ranked based on seniority, and for video games, you get paid per word, and the price per word goes up based on said seniority ranking. But Japan is also a different environment for voice actors. They do have issues with saturation (there is a whole "rookie" voice actor system that is probably intended to "help" with saturation), but there is also a lot of media that comes into Japan and gets dubbed over whereas not everything that comes to America gets dubbed over, and the pool of voice actors is limited only to Japan rather than potentially all of the English speaking world.
Personally, I'm all for VAs getting paid more. In a story heavy game, it helps add to the storytelling and having multiple audio languages make things more accessible. But it's suffering to figure out a way to do it that doesn't just instantly piss people off. Like I don't know if America could adapt a system like "pay per word". Japan also does "the agency takes everyone's paycheck, then dishes out a monthly monthly salary to everyone + more based on how much you did" which I can't see flying in America at all lmao. We also live a world where any kind of creative field gets scoffed at as "college degree to Starbucks employee" so some don't see jobs like that as "worth being paid much" to begin with.
You can't cull 75% of the VA population, you can't pull more jobs out of your ass, nor can you make tech bros and finance bros understand that creative fields are respectable, so hmm.
And of course, what Taylor did is absolutely going to make people think VAs are all "spoiled", living cushy lives cause they must *all* be getting paid $15k to work for 4 days,
hurr durr.
