HoYoverse partners with SIDE Global for Genshin Impact voice recording

SIDE Global, a recording studio with bases in London, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, has announced that it’s been chosen by HoYoverse to work on the English voice recording for Genshin Impact.

In a post on LinkedIn, the company revealed that it is “thrilled to provide voice production to this ongoing game” and showed off the trailer for Genshin Impact 5.2, the final update of the game published in 2024. Given that we’ve moved on to Version 5.3 by now, it’s clear that SIDE’s work on the game began quite a while before this official announcement.

Having experience from working on titles such as Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Alan Wake 2, Still Wakes the Deep, Horizon Zero Dawn: Forbidden West, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 under its belt, SIDE Global is a well-established name in the industry.

Crucially, the company has experience working with games like Genshin Impact, being the studio responsible for the English dub of Wuthering Waves.

HoYoverse previously worked with US-based studio Formosa on Genshin Impact, which caused several problems. Formosa famously neglected to pay the voice actress for Paimon and is now one of the studios struck by the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike that aims to protect VAs from having their voices stolen by AI.

HoYoverse moving away from Formosa has been rumored recently, but neither party wanted to confirm anything at the time. Signing with SIDE Global lends more credence to those rumors.

Although this won’t magically solve the current situation of characters being muted in the game due to their VAs being involved in the strike, this move may indicate that HoYoverse is looking for a cast that’s mainly based outside of the US to play future characters. The relations between SAG-AFTRA, union and non-union VAs, developers, and recording studios are complicated – in the long term, the best move for HoYoverse might well be to stay out of this web completely by working with talents and studios outside of the US, which have no such entanglements.

Both Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero, HoYoverse’s other big ongoing games, have had similar problems with muted characters recently. HSR 3.0 suffered the most so far, having quite a few key characters remain silent throughout the story.