On January 24, the release of a non-commercial Russian dubbing of GTA: Vice City by GamesVoice studio took place. In light of this, the App2Top editorial team interviewed the team about the initial downloads, budget, and why you shouldn’t expect Russian dubbing for RDR 2 and GTA V.

According to a representative from GamesVoice, a total of 155 voice actors participated in the localization.

“In terms of complexity, this was clearly one of the toughest dubbing projects, but in terms of speech volume, it lags behind not only Hogwarts Legacy but also Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and even Alan Wake 2.”

The localization process took a total of two and a half years. This timeframe is explained by the studio due to the game having several versions and the very challenging sound mixing process.

“The first six months were spent on translation, then a year on dubbing and sound mixing. The last year was dedicated to recording corrections, re-mixing the sound, and overcoming technical obstacles (both for the original and the Definitive version). The most challenging part was the sound mixing stage: cutscenes and radio had to be recreated from scratch because, in the original, speech is mixed with sounds and music.”

As a result, according to the GamesVoice representative, the studio exceeded the initial budget.

“We won't name the exact amount, but it exceeded half a million rubles. This surpassed the project's overall budget. However, the main participants of the project worked for free out of love for it. Payments were made to voice actors, sound engineers, and dubbing studios.”

GamesVoice also explained why they would not be undertaking the Russian dubbing for RDR 2.

“A quality result [for the dubbing] would literally require spending five years or more. Undertaking a project for such a long period does not make sense. There is a high probability that all participants would simply burn out. For the same reason, we won’t be doing GTA V. We see no point in doing a project of lesser quality; for such games, it's either excellent or not at all.”

When asked by the editorial team why both games are mentioned on the GamesVoice website in the “For Sponsors” section, along with their estimated budget of over 15 million rubles, the following response was given:

“The price is listed to deter at least some of those constantly demanding (specifically demanding, not just asking) for these two games to be dubbed.”

Regarding the initial downloads of the Russian dubbing for GTA: Vice City, according to the studio representative, “a few dozen thousand downloads occurred within two days.”

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