‘Pay your voice actors’: Fans blast Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ new dubbing NPCs campaign

Assassin’s Creed Shadows presented players with a golden opportunity to voice an NPC through a promotional event unveiled on Tuesday, but the fans aren’t pleased.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘ developer Ubisoft launched a marketing campaign called the Dubbing Challenge on TikTok, giving fans a unique chance to voice a secondary NPC to immortalize their voice in the game forever. The prize also includes a fully sponsored trip to London with a professional vocal coach and a recording session.

Assassin’s Creed fans very quickly voiced various issues with the contest across X (formerly Twitter), with the biggest being that the company seems to be adopting tactics to avoid paying voice actors in the industry by “making fans work for exposure” rather than just getting compensated fairly for their contribution to the game.

“Pay your voice actors. We see you,” one player said on X, while others shared the sentiment in follow-up responses. At the same time, others said they fear the gaming giant will “farm voices for training AI” in the future without the person’s consent on the matter.

To participate, fans will need to upload their dubbing video on TikTok in their preferred language, saying iconic Assassin’s Creed dialogues from the cutscenes. The developers have clarified that the contest will only consider the dubbing skills and likes and comments won’t be a metric for judging fans and selecting winners.

With the rise of AI to make NPCs dialogues and industry-wide layoffs in the gaming industry, it seems to be a bad time to have an event promoting an unhealthy atmosphere for voice actors that takes away work from them to promote a release.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes the series back to Feudal Japan in the age of Samurai and Shinobis, where players will go back to a smaller open-world map.