Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford has lashed out at David Eddings, the original voice actor of Claptrap, over Eddings’ explaination over why he wasn’t returning for Borderlands 3.
Yesterday, Eddings said he asked to be paid for his work on Borderlands 3 and essentially, Gearbox wasn’t prepared to pay him what he asked for. Eddings’ tweet also said this would have been the first occasion he was paid to voice the role — though it needs to be noted that Eddings worked as Gearbox as VP of Business Development up until 2017, so was a salaried employee at the time of his voice recordings.
Taking to Twitter, Pitchford gave Gearbox’s side of the story.
“There was no ‘force’ – He wanted it (and reveled in it). The issue today is that Mr. Eddings is bitter and disgruntled about having been terminated,” Pitchford wrote. “He was offered 2x scale, he refused. I don’t want him to do it unless he wants to do it, as motivation affects performance.”
“We offer the opportunity for salaried employees to voice characters in the game, but is not mandatory responsibility to their job requirements,” Gearbox later said to IGN in a further statement. “In this particular case, now that [Eddings] was no longer an employee, we offered him an industry standard rate, but were not able to reach an agreement.”
Eddings now works as Head of Game Publishing at Rooster Teeth.
Borderlands 3 heads to Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4 in September. We previewed it here.
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