The Like a Dragon games have recently arrived in a big bundle on the GOG storefront, though fans have noticed these versions of the game have stricken the series creator and other staff members from the credits. The Like a Dragon series, formally once titled the Yakuza series in the West, has been getting ported to a variety of platforms in the past few years, with many of these games ending up on PC via Steam. The franchise has also recently been brought to the aforementioned PC-focused storefront, Good Old Games, or GOG for short.
This bundle is known as the Yakuza: Complete Series, which consists of all the games in the Kazuma Kiryu Saga, the first seven chronological mainline games in the series. This includes the two Kiwami remakes of Yakuza 1 and 2, the prequel Yakuza 0, the HD remasters of Yakuza 3-5, and finally Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. One fan was curious to see if the versions that were brought onto GOG would be different from the Steam ports. Aside from the removal of DRM associated with GOG-bought games, they had noticed that there were plenty of staff members who worked on the games that were removed from the credits.
These findings were posted on the r/yakuzagames subreddit by u/Timo653, where they noticed that all seven games in this collection had some names removed. This includes former Like a Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi, producer Daisuke Sato, and even whole companies like Lab42 and QLOC who helped in porting the games to Steam. The user even included screenshots that compared the two game versions, which showed that there is a noticeable gap in-between the credits lines, which were once occupied by the former director and producer, among other omissions.
They also noted that these ports directly lifted from the Steam versions that Lab42 and QLOC worked on, as opposed to the Like a Dragon games brought on the Microsoft store (the latter versions featured changes to the button prompts and censored Rising Sun imagery). To further scrub the names of these companies out from the credits, they note that script files have been modified to disable the logos of these companies upon booting up GOG's version. Many believe that these are very disrespectful and unnecessary changes.
These modified credits at the time of this writing are only in the GOG version of these games, while the Steam version properly credits these staff members. Employees who previously worked on these versions noted they weren't contacted about these until now, with one posting in the thread they worked hard in making their versions an entry point for newcomers. Some comment that Sega or RGG Studio's removal of credits might be tied to Toshihiro Nagoshi and Daisuke Sato's departure from Sega in 2021, though it's mainly just speculation.