The Complete Yakuza Series available from retailer Good Old Games last week, bundling the franchise’s first seven games into a single offering. It is a Great Deal, but fans who’ve been testing the release to see if there’s anything different about it have stumbled upon something odd.
While the games themselves appear to be identical to versions already available on Steam, there were two notable differences. The first was that there was no DRM (Digital Rights Management) due to the GoG. The second reason is that some games have seen changes to the end credits, leaving out some of the key people involved in the development of the series.
Like this Reddit post by u/Timo653 shows, Yakuza 0’s Credits cropped a CEO nod for Toshihiro Nagoshi, the creator of the serieswho left Sega in 2021 to join NetEase. Also, Daisuke Saito, who joined Nagoshi in his new studio, had his line producer credit revoked, as well as (thanks, PC gamer) Director Kazuki Hosokawa, Art Supervisor Saizo Nagai and Design Supervisor Koji Yoshida.
There’s clearly studio politics in there that I absolutely don’t want to get involved with (because I have no idea what happened!), but whatever happened to Ryu Ga Gotoku over the last few years, it’s still a very bad try Actively removing someone’s name from the credits of a video game that has been out for years.
It will be even worse if the studios involved in releasing the games on PC will have their credits revoked. The British company Lab42 was responsible for both Yakuza 0 And Yakuza Kiwami—as their website still shows– while QLOC did the rest “with a team of 50+ people”, not only on PC but also on Xbox. Both studios’ names were removed from the credits and replaced with those of a mostly Japanese “PC development team”.
Even if a person’s name doesn’t appear in the credits of a game they worked on, sometimes it can be a simple administrative error – sometimes a lot of people from very different places contribute! and political construct, a means for people in a position of power to say what (or who) is more important than others.
Again for the folks (and studios) in the background: Anyone who has worked on a game should be credited.
