Most of these are assumptions and some are wrong bcuz Platinum is about the same size as Santa Monica, and Santa Monica was also developing multiple titles. Games are a lot more expensive to make nowadays. We have to remember the reason why Wii U had so little third party games was due to how difficult it was to make a game for it. Like u said, development costs are primarily labor costs. If u want to compare, the average interval between God of War games was 3 years, Nier also about 3 years, whereas Bayonetta games are taking 5 years. 

Anyways, we are just spitting bullshit at each other and all of this is heavy speculation relying on random sources. My point is tho, I wonder where the heck she got 450m from and we can all agree Bayonetta is definitely not that big right? Even u agreed half a billion is ridiculous.

https://kotaku.com/platinum-games-making-only-original-titles-is-very-dif-1757046346

"Platinum Games talks about how things have changed over the past decade as it went from a staff of 60 to its current 180 or so, tripling in size."

In 2007-2009 Platinum Games only had about 60 employees, yet they were working on three games: Madworld, Bayonetta, and Infinite Space. By that time, Santa Monica already had nearly 200 employees. It took them two years to develop the original Bayonetta as the company didn't exist before 2007, and the game released in 2009. 

Santa Monica wasn't developing multiple games in 2009. You can look at their internal development record here. 

The time-interval for development only matters if all else is equal (equal number of employees working on the title, equal marketing budget, equal salaries of employees, no or similar start/stops to production, etc.) But you can't make that assumption. For starters, Santa Monica is an American studio and the average American software developer makes much more than the average Japanese one. Bayonetta 2 took five years because it halted production and started again when Nintendo brought in funding. Bayonetta 3 definitely seems like it has a higher budget than the first two, but it is likely going to sell a lot better than they did too. 

Yes, half a billion is a ridiculous number for the total revenue of the franchise. It doesn't matter to her argument though. Nintendo could afford to pay voice actors better when the game sells 2 million copies at almost full price. 

Bold 1: Does it? Do we know how many hours it was gonna take? The source isn't outdated either. We lack important details that she did not provide.

Bold 2: There's no "but still". Mo-cap is completely different and is obviously done over a longer time frame. It's not just VA, it's full body acting. There's is no reason for someone who just needs to speak the lines into a microphone to take more than a few days. What exactly did you expect to take that long?

Regardless of all that I'm not sure I can believe anything she said anyways, since it clearly already included at least one piece of false information. I don't believe every nonsense someone on Twitter shows up with.

Why didn't she bring it up until now? She could have easily stirred the drama half a year ago when it became apparent she wasn't the VA. The fact that she only brought it up after Platinum said it was "scheduling conflicts" that made them change the VA, adds credibility. And if what she said is false, Kamiya -- who isn't the beacon of professionalism himself -- would've brought the receipts. He's not one to hold back. Instead he denied it and called non-Japanese speakers "insects", banned 4,000 people in an hour on his twitter account as a PR-deaf means of damage control and then got his account suspended because Twitter thought he was a bot. 

Hmmm nice points, although u never provided evidence Santa Monica was at 200 in 2009. It was 240 at 2014 according to the Wiki u gave, but I would assume they employed more during the time period of 2009 to 2014 as they expanded studios and preparing for their biggest game God of War. You mentioned Platinum working on three games but Madworld looks like a low budget game and Infinite Space is co-developed. Not really fair when ur not including co-developed games for Santa Monica such as Ghost of Sparta that released on the same year with God of War 3. But it doesn't matter, I just mentioned God of War 3 as an example for a similar game costing 4 times more than $10m. It wasn't meant to be taken as a direct comparison, just some reference, bcuz we don't have much to work with. And ye Nintendo could have paid voice actors better, and they're quite stingy with voice actors as we know. But they probs set a budget amount to Platinum and Platinum chose how to spent it (I'm only assuming). I think it's safe to say Bayonetta 2 costed more than Bayonetta 1. To Nintendo, they obviously don't care too deeply about Bayonetta. They are just publishing it to provide various genres bcuz someone at Nintendo loved it.

2 million including the Switch port, the Switch version is $50 full price, $60 for Wii U but had a lot of price drop. Let's be generous and assume they all sold at $50. That's $100m in total. As we know, physical rates our higher on Nintendo consoles. A good portion of that goes to creating discs and cartridges, retailers, Sega, gold coins for Switch. Let's say all of that is 30% of the whole thing which I think is reasonable. That means at best Nintendo is earning $70m without accounting the development cost and fee provided to Platinum, and port to Switch. We don't know the full story yet, ppl are speculating Jennifer Hale was paid more (I doubt it tbh) and they wanted to replace Hellena Taylor by providing a cheap wage. Hellena Taylor is not some big actor either we have to be real. People are claiming she's talented and yada yada but her last role being Bayonetta 8 years ago is no big name. I mentioned this before I do think she deserves more, but I still want to point out some different perspectives why maybe she wasn't payed as much. I'm not gonna go further until more information. I feel like there wouldn't be a conclusion made with this and we can go on and on. I also feel like we are losing the primal reason for this debate. Ur probs looking for evidence to prove Santa Monia was 200 at 2009, but u don't have to. I pointed my perspective and I think ur statement is reasonable as well. There's no true answer currently

why are you guys defending sides? seems to me the only thing acceptable here is speculation because we don't have in any shape or form the full picture

One last thing, I've seen tons of newbies raging at Kamiya for this, but you have to remember Kamiya created his "twitter persona" bcuz of Bayonetta fans sending death threats and hate speech and such. There's a whole story behind the banning he does, the "insect" aren't necessarily targeting towards non-japanese speakers but people that gives him stupid replies. I'm pretty sure there's a whole video on YouTube explaining Kamiya's twitter I remember watching it 2 years ago so hopefully more people would watch that video since Kamiya isn't really that crazy dude he is on twitter. There are tons of videos proving this with Kamiya being in videos and talking with other people. Like Kit and Krysta, Sakurai, Yoshida, Mega64, Ign interviews, etc. I do think his approach to this incident was terrible tho no denying that. Never get emotional when ur in a bad spot.

Well nobody was really defending anything

Well well well... I didn't know a game like Bayonetta would only take some 16 hours of MC voice work to get it done. I fail to see how it's Platinum's or Nintendo's responsibility that she isn't an active VA. Even if she is indeed underpaid compared to her average peer, the whole thing seems overblown, but I expect nothing less from the justice warring lunatics and social media attention whores than to stan sociable positions like acting, especially female actors, to the point of borderline madness.

I have to ask myself why do we draw the line at VA's when we know very well that most emplyees have it much worse and yet they go mostly ignored? She might be underpaid compared to executives, shareholders, producers, director etc, but she's hella overpaid compared to the average employee including developers. VA's must have it a lot better than most people if $4000 per 16 hours (that's $250 per hour ffs) is perceieved as an earth shattering insult. My mom, brother, and sister work their asses off for 160+ hours a month to get this (arguably overpaid) 6000 AUD I mentioned. I'm sorry Bayonetta VA, but your work is apparently much easier than I surmised. I can still see why people would side with her but my god are the reactions disproportionate to the crime. Stop harrassing Kamiya!! The film and music industries have conditioned us to view celebrities as demi gods with special rights. A segment of VA's want to have some of that privilege extended to them, and I don't like it.

With that being said, I'm NOT taking sides here as there is a lot I know nothing about or am wrong about, and just because countless people have it worse doesn't mean she's being treated fairly. I'm just sick and tired of cancel culture and social network zombies.

I am a Data Scientist (my literal title is Software Engineer II, but my role is that of a Data Scientist) who makes what she was offered in about three weeks (fewer than three-weeks if you include my employment benefits as compensation since I am not an independent contractor.) I wouldn't trade my situation with hers and I doubt most other software developers would. Even game developers who are typically overworked and underpaid compared to other software developers likely wouldn't. Voice-acting seems like high intensity work when it is happening. Very rarely do I experience that level of intensity (maybe three hours a week when I am presenting insights to account managers.) $250 /hr might seem high, but remember independent contractors have to pay both sides of payroll taxes in most countries whereas employees usually only pay half, they don't get employer contributions to a pension plan, in the U.S in particular they don't get health-care, etc.