Gaming Voice Actor Strike?

From what I've gathered, their trying to convince non-union actors to also take part in the strike.

Problem is that AAA videogames making is an international business. I doubt a VA located in another country will care about being called a scab by an american union.

Take Assassins Creed whose games, while led by Ubisoft Montreal, involve a dozen studios in almost as many countries. Are they scabs when they aren't even in the same country? Unions are limited by borders. Corporations aren't.

Plus there's the fact that AAA gaming isn't doing as well as it used to. We live in a world where Square Enix can say it was disappointed by the sales of the last Tomb Raider when it sold a million copies in 48 hours, 3.4 million within a few months, and the company is still taking a loss on it until the end of the year (2013) when the game finally broke even.

Game budgets have gotten so bloated that it's pushing devs to any and all dirty stratagem to milk every cents. With Ubisoft saying they won't entertain an IP they can't make sequels out of, because making a standalone game you can't reuse part of to make sequels is financially not viable.

I think the VA may find the big companies more than happy to go looking elsewhere for voice actors. Plus giving them increase pay may open demands from programmers, whose salaries have been slashed in recent years. And THEY are the ones pulling in 60 to 70 hours work weeks in the months before a game's release. Not voice actors.

Plus like it's been mentioned, Devs rent out recording facility, so recording in a different country is really no biggie. Nowadays you don't even need to fly the Voice Director over, he can do his work via conference calls.

edited 24th Sep '15 9:41:12 AM by Ghilz

See, there's this issue of companies pumping more and more cash into a game or a franchise and needing increasingly high profit margins to cover those operating costs. Square Enix goes through game engines and gameplay alterations like tissue paper, EA pumps millions into ad revenue and nickel-and-dime everyone they can and Ubisoft crams out three or four similar games every year like they're Marvel Studios. Big money is going into game development, and more money is needed to pull the investors out. It's unsustainable. When the employees hired to code, make art or voice characters are paid peanuts for their vital contributions, but you have the same well-publicized higher-ups making statements and attending presentations year after year, that's probably a good time to look into how much a CEO is paid in comparison to whole teams of people making games.

Voice actors have always been underpaid to some degree. And with the amount of voice work needed for today's games, it wouldn't surprise me if amazing voice actors can barely support themselves, or make rent for a place that doesn't suck. There's a lot of money that's thrown around that never reaches the people who make the game what it is - but there have been cases of tech people making it and making their own start-ups, like the ill-fated Ion Storm or Naughty Dog building a solid market share with a PS 1 devkit (not entirely the same, but you have people heading influential companies or being able to throw money around as a producer).

Meanwhile, Steve Blum, Troy Baker, Rob Paulsen - they're well-known, they make a living, but they're not really up to much unless it's another VA gig. They do good work and manage to stay afloat, but they're never chasing anything unless it's something like this call-to-arms over wages. There's no way to work upwards into the games industry, and on top of that they're paid pretty modestly for what could amount to hours worth of lines, weeks of takes and retakes in a recording booth for a paycheck that keeps them and their families in the green. Even with developers being eaten up by these huge publishers and being passed around and sold like cattle, there's a fairly steady source of income that can come from years of work. V As go gig to gig, where jobs aren't guaranteed, and get paid a pittance for a pretty integral part of triple-A gaming.

There's a lot wrong with the games industry, but voice work has been consistently low-paying for even the best voice actors for years, inside and out of video game work. It looks like there's enough of an alternative for publishers to turn to a cheaper source of VA work if there was a push for higher wages, and that's a shame. I honestly think that voice work is under-appreciated and underpaid, and I think that workplace standards for voice work should be higher.

So, as someone who wants to be a voice actor some day, what does this mean for me?

Not to work for video game companies?

Video game companies typically outsource voice work to studios, those studios are the ones that usually handle almost everything.

Most video game companies actually pay more than say Anime companies too. Video games are mid tier really, one who gets famous from anime voice work moves up to video games and generally 'too big' for anime outside of existing roles.

Hm, interesting, I did notice a good amount of big-name video-game VAs started out in anime and then stopped doing the latter.

Pretty much when you get into gaming chances are they won't do anime roles much anymore.

Well, anime tends to be more niche than video games.

I think Square has recently learned from their mistakes in the last generation. Their Shinra Technologies is basically a dedicated R&D branch (currently working on Cloud tech, but not limited to just that), they're finally using engines like Unreal rather than try to reinvent the wheel every year, and they make easy games to garner quick profits and then use them to make AAA a bit more sustainable than earlier (without going into sequelitis, which fans seem to not care for), so there may be a way out for AA in the near future.

On the voice acting front, I don't think unions will happen here, for reasons already mentioned. Methinks instead, they'll do something akin to the Studio System in olden Hollywood, where each major company has a "stable" of talent. The voice actor, instead of getting higher pay, instead just gets a set of guarenteed gigs (a major reason why V As want higher pay is because getting a gig is, even for the seasoned superstars, NOT an easy thing to do).

A Voice Actor's Union already exists though its known as SAG-AFTRA. Many actors though will do a non-union job under a stage name.

This issue here is the big names want a royalties pay scale and really that's all there is to it. Its basically going to screw over the actors who do little jobs and only going help those doing games that sell millions of copies. While right now it was a flat pay a flat rate per line.

It would also help/hurt Niche titles since they wont have to pay as much but also wont attract quality talent.

Subscription and FTP titles will be a mess.

edited 24th Sep '15 6:57:36 PM by Memers

Niche titled already have non union acting tho, so for your Neptunia's and shit like that, not much is gonna change. And before you ask, no Persona is not niche, when your up against Fallout 4 for the RPG battle of the year (once P5 and FO 4 are out nobody's gonna give a shit about Witcher or Shadowrun or anything not named Fallout or Persona), you ain't niche anymore.

I don't play Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil anyway, so they can leave for all I care. ;)

I thought it was already established in this thread that Atlus was non-union, though?

Iwata was a good man. When things got bad he slashed his salary to try to avoid firing people.

I thought it was union cause Troy Baker's in it and he's definitely union

I know everything else Atlus does isn't tho

edited 25th Sep '15 9:42:43 AM by RoboZombie

Though did they change because SEGA purchased them recently so they might have been non-union before they were aquired by SEGA.

P4 was before the Sega purchase.

The reason for Ted's voice actor changing was because his first one went union and did not want to work non union jobs. Everyone else did, twice, so they all were willing to accept non-union jobs, probably because the pay was good due to the amount of lines needing to be recorded.

edited 25th Sep '15 10:12:01 AM by Memers

Wil Wheaton's reasoning for supporting the strike.

Atlus doesn't list their voice casts to let union workers do non union work, though alot of union workers don't really want to do non union work like that anymore.

Catherine however, was Union, even though it pretty much used the same V As they always did.

The Persona spinoff's were not, but it's unknown if Persona 5 which is their biggest title in recent years will be Union or not. Although if they are striking it probably won't be since they'd be pressured to get it released quickly strike or not.

Wheaton makes some good points. And why shouldn't it be about residuals, anyway? Are video game VAs somehow lesser categories of human being than VAs in any other medium?

edited 25th Sep '15 12:55:29 PM by Fighteer

I totally didn't practice the script he made up for an hour. No siree....

Programmers don't get residuals, and they do far more work than V As do.

Give the people who actually do the long hours residuals, and then we'll talk.

Make the same change with respect to CGI programmers in films or animators in cartoons and we'll talk. Perfect parity among all people who participate in developing an entertainment product is not in the scope of this labor action, and insisting on it is an attempt to divert attention from the issue via Perfect Solution Fallacy.

Actors get residuals. Crew and production staff do not. That's how these things work. If you don't like it, fine, but you can't hold it out as a poison pill against a very reasonable claim.

edited 25th Sep '15 1:54:32 PM by Fighteer

Perhaps they should.

And perhaps, given the workload that they do, they should be higher up my imaginary list.

But as for this voice acting strike, I feel that there are people who deserve better first, that they are not going to be treated any better, and that is that.

I fully admit that this leans into Tall Poppy Syndrome, by the way.

edited 25th Sep '15 2:05:06 PM by Grounder