Paul McCartney working with Bungie

@Sanguis_Malus Exactly. Thank you for that.

@TheIfym20

That might probably be a "Yes."

@GinsuVictim

Lol. People are dumb.

@wezkilla WTH? You just ripped off my joke from below. Get your own material! :)

@ShadowsDemon People actually "liked" that horrible pun? Wow....

@Hockenberry there is a reason he dosnt need money ;)

@Bartz77 Well put. Creativity and awesomeness demand respect.

@Bartz77

Ah, yes, in this capitalistic society, success is measured by how many dollars you rake in. Not to imply that McCartney isn't talented or that he can't write good music, but I sort of feel that there's someone out there who's poor as hell, that can write better music than him. You don't need a big name to display extraordinary talent. Sorry, but this just comes off as more of a marketing ploy than anything. "McCartney makes the music? Oh, I gotta get the game." That will probably ring through a lot of heads.

@Bartz77 I wanna comment on this because I feel your first paragraph may be aimed at my comment made a little lower.

I feel like you didn't read my comment and are instead blowing what I said a little out of context. My point was that a lesser known but very talented voice actor was able to provide a superior service for a nominal fee. He was then replaced by another talented actor/voice actor (voice acting is still acting and requires much skill). The difference between the 2 was that the second one was very well known and as such came with a much higher price tag. The result of which was a waste of money because it was money that was not spent for the product's target market.

Similarities can be drawn to this article aswell. You have to do an analysis on cost of a big name talent versus return on that cost. For a game like Guitar Hero or Rockband, getting someone like Paul McCartney to provide music is fantastic. Not only are you getting a superior product, but you are getting a name that is recognized by the game genres targeted demographic. For something like Destiny you have to ask if having the name in the credits will provide enough increased revenue to justify the cost of hiring him, compared to a lesser known but still talented musician.

"Padding resumes" doesn't really apply here in any of these arguments and it goes back to @Dasim64 original comment that because the gaming industry is making more money than the movie industry, for much less money then some big name people are trying to get in on it.

It's all at a cost to both the little guy and to the consumer. Especially if it takes away from actual game development time.

@Bartz77 ...and yet with all those achievements, many people on these boards will actually be more familiar with Rick Astley :P

@Dasim64 Absolutely! It's like all those half-assed film licences or those awful FMV games from years ago featuring famous actors. Awful games, but people bought them because of the publicity.

@Dasim64 I really agree with you and I wanna add to the subject. I was watching an episode of X-Play (Miss Sessler) the other day and they interviewed the voice actor for Uncharted. It was pretty fascinating hearing his viewpoints and he brought up this exact thing.

In the interview he mentioned how he was set to do the voice over for a main character in a children's game and that his agent had to fight tooth and nail just to get him a fair paycheck for his work. What happened was that a big name actor (not mentioned) came in to the project to do the voice of the character instead and the company coughed up like 10x the amount of money to get the actor to do so. He then mentioned that since it was a kids game he asked his own kid if had even heard of the actor now doing the voice over and they had no idea who it was, so they spent 10x their budget on 1 big name when the guy (Sorry I really can't remember his name, those Uncharted fans out there probably wanna hit me right now :\, my apologies) could do the same job or better and get the same result.

L.A. Noire really strikes out to me as one game that put a good use to hiring some great talent to act out their characters. Everything else seems like a pointless waste of money just to get a high profile name on the credits for marketing.