On Feb. 2, a group of video game performers and video game producers met to renegotiate the Interactive Media Agreement.
Some of the folks in the room were big hitters and signatories to the existing contract, including EA Games, Activision, Disney and Warner Bros., as well as smaller recording studios like Blindlight and Formosa. We put our proposals on the table, they put their proposals on the table, there was some polite and spirited back and forth, but no agreement was reached.
Both sides met again on June 23. Still, no agreement was reached.
We are now at a crossroads.
The sticking points:
We’re asking for a reasonable performance bonus for every 2 million copies, or downloads sold, or 2 million unique subscribers to online-only games, with a cap at 8 million units/ subscribers. That shakes out, potentially, to FOUR bonus payments for the most successful games: 2 million, 4 million, 6 million and 8 million copies.
It’s a simple approach to secondary payments, and it’ll net you up to four extra union scale payments for your performance (currently $3300.00).
We believe actors should get stunt pay for vocally stressful recording sessions the same way they get stunt pay for physically demanding roles. That’s why we’re proposing to limit “vocally stressful” recording sessions to two hours at the same union minimums.
We propose that the actual title of the project should be made available to at least our representatives before we are asked to audition. Again, precedent is on our side here. You wouldn’t work on a TV show, commercial or film without knowing what part you’re playing and how it fits into the story, yet we are asked over and over again to do just that in interactive media.
Shrug. I suppose I vaguely support the voice actors but I don’t like voice acting in most games. It is hard to really support something that feels like wasted money and effort.
The difference between a quality voice actor and a non-voice A/B-list regular actor or a run-of-the-mill crappy voice actor is pretty amazing in my opinion. I fully support the good ones to get paid some bonuses!
Absolutely. Most of the bad AAA game voice acting isn’t due to the actors’ performance, it’s the scripts. A bad script is always going to sound bad, but a decent voice performance can make it tolerable. By a similar token a great script is miles better when performed by good actors, but bad acting can ruin the best dialogue.
Greedy, greedy, greedy. They come in for a couple of afternoons and record lines. The devs pull all nighters for months at a time. How is this reasonable?
Who was the voice actor that played Michael De Santa in GTA V? Did anyone know or care before the videogame came out? This is why people hate unions.
Because good voice acting is a skill, just like programming. If a developer doesn’t want to pay union wages, they can get Bob down in QA to read the lines and have shitty-sounding voice acting like most video games.
The union is specifically calling the payments “residuals”. Because, yeah, the game industry wants to open up that can of worms when the talent who make the game never actually see residuals…
This is the same problem it was last time it was negotiated. The union thinks that the voice acting is the core creative content and draw for the game (or at least acts that way), and bluntly, in games, it is not.
And that makes a voice acting union a good idea why? I would argue that animators, texture artists and programmers have much more difficult jobs than voice actors. How about AI programmers? Level designers? Sound effect engineers? Where is their union?
The whole thing is gobsmacking. One understands the power of negotiating with an actor that has a body of work in film that people enjoy and the leverage that gives them. But videogames rarely highlight whatever voice actor is playing the protagonist or NPCs. It’s not the draw. This union doesn’t understand the industry at all. Their example of someone who got a bonus for game sales was the COO of EA! Dum dums.
You often hear this reasoning when a group of people come together and demand better conditions, “But X and Y have it much worse, it’s not fair!”. The focus for devs shouldn’t be trying to drag everyone else down to their often abysmal working conditions, but lift themselves up. I don’t personally know much about how hard it is to be a professional game voice actor and how what the pay is like, but the grass is always greener on the other side.
The stunt pay sounds strange, unless the sessions can be grueling enough to risk throat damage. Just think of all the grunts, shouts, yells, and so on these guys have to do! They might have to pretend they’re being shot at 100 times a day in slightly different ways, I imagine it would tax the vocal chords. Knowing the project title sounds entirely reasonable.
As I said the last time this came up here, the union needs to reach out to unionize the game developers so that they have allies in the development world.
Can you imagine having to join some stupid union in order to program? Do you know how frustrating that would be? Imagine if you had to clear indie videogame releases with a union. It would destroy innovation and collaboration. People are free to organize however they want but there are many industries where unions don’t make sense.
Great knee-jerk reaction there, ElGuapo. Maybe when you start hiring for your animation studio you’ll have a better understanding. Unless you’ve created an AI for that as well.
Yeah, it’s really crippled the film industry having basically their entire labor force unionized. No-one can make a single damn movie without asking the union’s permission.
I’ll simply repeat what I said last time this came up: If game developers want quality voice actors, they need to pay for them. Commercials do. Animated productions do. The artists and crews on both such productions work much longer than the actors, and yet the actors still get scale and residuals based on numbers of views.
Why should games be different? If it’s truly so much less time intensive than non-interactive media, then that will work itself out in the amount of studio time required. But with more and more AAA games boasting more and more voiced lines, that studio time seems to be on the rise.
Devs don’t want to pay? Fine. Don’t. Hire amateurs or get in house folks to do it. That can work out okay (see: Terri Brosius), but more often than not quality suffers and gamers complain. You get what you pay for.
And while “stunt voice work” is a needlessly provocative phrase, anyone who doesn’t see how you could damage your throat by doing harsh vocals over and over again, even with proper training, obviously hasn’t done it before.
