SEGA recently released the Yakuza series on GOG but not without removing several developers and support studios from the games’ credits.
As reported by PC Gamer, Timo653 on Reddit pointed out each game in the series is affected, with chief creator Toshihiro Nagoshi perhaps the highest profile removal.
He’s not the only one though, as in in Yakuza 0, for example, even director Kazuki Hosokawa, art supervisor Saizo Nagai, and game design supervisor Koji Yoshida were removed.
Support studios, who don’t lead design on the game but assist with more technical aspects, were also cut. Lab42 was previously credited as porting Yakuza 0 and Kiwami to PC but was removed from those credits. QLOC was similarly credited with porting Kiwami 2 and Yakuza 3, 4, 5, and 6 to PC, but was also pulled.
“Despite using a larger font and more spacing, the GOG credits manage to be shorter than the Steam version ones, because of all the removed names,” said Timo653. “A bunch of names are missing from almost every section of the credits. Some of the removed people seem to be former Sega employees who left for Nagoshi Studio, but I’m not sure about the other removals.”
The NetEase-owned Nagoshi Studio was founded by Nagoshi after he left Sega in 2021, and given his connection to Yakuza’s roots and the core of the Ryu Ga Gotaku Studio, some Sega staff joined him on the new adventure. It’s unclear if there is a connection to the employees removed from the credits and the ones who left Sega for Nagoshi Studio, but IGN has asked Sega for comment.
Timo653 continued: “This feels unnecessary and disrespectful to the people who worked on these games. As of the time of writing this post, only the GOG version has these ‘updated’ credits. The people who worked on these games are still credited properly on the Steam version.”
The collection encompasses the seven numbered Yakuza games, meaning Zero through to 6, and not Yakuza: Like a Dragon which essentially rebranded the franchise in the west. Ryu Ga Gotaku Studio tried to explain why the change was made, though perhaps only made things much more confusing.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
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