The recent rereleases of seven games in the Yakuza series on GOG have altered credits which exclude numerous staff members from the primary Ryu ga Gotoku development team as well as some entire support studios.
First noticed by reddit user u/Timo653 and reported by PC Gamer, the removed staff includes studios Lab42 and QLOC, who worked on porting the games to PC, and even some very major players in the games’ development.
These major players include series directors Toshihiro Nagoshi and Daisuke Sato, both of whom recently left Sega in 2021 to form a new studio called Nagoshi Studio. u/Timo653 noted that some of the other names removed were also former Sega staff who left to join Nagoshi Studio, including Yakuza 0 director Kazuki Hosokawa, but this does not seem to account for all of them.
As for the support studios, Lab42 was credited as the PC porting studio for the Steam releases of Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami, while QLOC was credited with this for Yakuza Kiwami 2 through 6. While the GOG versions appear to only be slightly modified versions of these ports, both studios are entirely absent from the credits, with u/Timo653’s analysis of some of the game’s code even revealing that QLOC’s logo was deliberately removed from Yakuza Kiwami 2’s start-up screen.
Another reddit user claiming to be an employee of Lab42 commented on the post expressing disappointment at not being credited properly.
“Well that’s not ideal. We put a LOT of blood, sweat and tears into those games, I tell you what,” the commenter said. “We set out to make the absolute best versions of them – they were obviously far from perfect, but we put a lot into them, really wanted them to live up to the series’ greatness.”
u/Timo653 also noted that these credits changes only affect the GOG versions, and that the Steam versions still contain the proper credit.
The games industry has always had issues with properly crediting creators, especially with rereleases. Recent remasters of Metroid Prime and Pac-Man World are among the latest other examples of developers being dropped from credits on rerelease (though the latter was eventually rectified). Sega has yet to comment publicly on the issue, so it is unknown if this will be fixed in the future.