The release of Sega and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s Yakuza series on the GOG platform has excluded several developers as well as support studios from the credits.
The recent release of the Yakuza “Complete” Series bundle on GOG had promted Reddit user Timo653 to explore possible changes made to the games. To their surprise, besides the removal of DRM, the other change made was to the credits, which were redone.
Across all seven games, numerous members of the development team were omitted, most notably individuals like Toshihiro Nagoshi, Daisuke Sato, the entire Lab42 team (from Yakuza 0 and Kiwami 1), and QLOC (from Yakuza Kiwami 2 to 6). As a matter of fact, the Yakuza Kiwami 2 and 6 port went as far as eliminating the QLOC logo that appeared during startup by editing a certain script file. The exclusion of Lab42 and QLOC from the credits comes as rather surprising, given how these ports relied on the work done by these teams.
Despite utilizing a larger font and increased spacing, the GOG credits ended up being smaller than their Steam counterparts due to the removal of numerous names. Almost every section of the credits lacks multiple names. While some of the omitted individuals appear to be former SEGA employees who transitioned to Nagoshi Studio, the reason behind the removal of other developers’ names remains unclear.
It is evident that the ports are based on the Steam versions rather than the ones found on the Microsoft Store, which did undergo certain changes, such as improved Xbox button prompts and censorship of the Taiwan and Rising Sun flags.
The decision to remove the names of individual developers as well as entire support studios feels unnecessary and disrespectful to their work and the effort they had put in the creation of the Yakuza series. As of writing, only the GOG version contains these altered credits, and the Steam version continues to have the full credits.
