Topic: Voice Actors Reach Agreement with Publishers

[WindyMan]

A new deal with voice actors will see a pay increase up front for game vocals, but no long-term residual payments.

The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have struck a three-and-a-half year agreement with videogame publishers to see that voice actors used in videogames are fairly compensated for their work.  The previous deal expired at the end of 2004.    

In the deal, publishers will increase minimum pay to the actors who lend their voices to games by 36%.  SAG and AFTRA were pushing for a residual payment system, wherein voice actors would have been paid per copy sold of the game they were featured in, similar to how payment is rendered in the TV and movie industries.  In the end, the two unions reluctantly dropped the demand from the negotiations, and a deal with the over 70 publishers involved was reached.    

Games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Halo 2, as well as many of Nintendo's games, feature voice work from actors from the big screen and television.  Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Fonda, and Keith David are just some of the actors featured in new games.  This new deal assures they can continue voice work if they so desire.

[Bloodworth]

The US video game industry is still pretty backwards when it comes to labor management. It's only fair for the actors (and the rest of your creative personnel) to get a cut of the profits or an added bonus if a game sells millions.

[KDR_11k]

Pfft, yeah and it's only fair to pay 100$ for a game. Games are already produced on very low profit margins. They are nowhere as big as movies and can't afford the same business model. Besides, I don't think the technical staff gets residuals on movies, either. Just the big name actors do because their presence alone helps sell the movie. Many people suggest unions for game developers but EA is already so close to completely outsourcing to India (DICE, one of their assimilated companies, already does) that they'd probably outsource completely if there's no cheap labor to be exploited in the US. It's not like you have to put up with the abuse and crunch time anyway, quite a few people manage to get by even at EA without joining the deathmarches.

These scumbags get 700 dollars per four hour session, double pay after six, can you imagine that??? They do the LEAST amount of work on the game and contribute the least to its success yet they get the biggest hourly pay and even wanted residuals? You know what, f#ck them, let your coders do the voiceovers. Works pretty well, companies like Blizzard produced fairly good stuff without hiring actual actors. Actually compared to the performances of actual actors the coders seem to be much better at the job. The actors say they deserve the pay because they only get one or two jobs a month. Well, maybe you should get a real job, then! Voice acting is hardly fulltime, leaves enough time to work as a coder or artist on a game. Sure, that means less gigs but hell, you get regular pay and probably more than you would have made as a VA.

Besides, those big name actors get even more. MILLIONS for a few lines of badly delivered dialogue!

[Nephilim]

This is good for the actors but will only drive companys out of america or they will do the voice acting in another country... much like when they increased tax years ago, and everyone started using australia

[Bloodworth]

I'm not referring to the pay rate so much as the pay structure, and this is something that I think should apply to the whole creative team.  There really needs to be something a bit different than either plan though, because the issue basically has to do with ridiculous-sellers like Halo 2 that the publisher makes an enormous profit on - profit on your talent and unpaid overtime.  Some titles may not even break even, so it isn't quite right to pay the artist per unit, but for those mega-hits, there needs to be some added kickback to the people that made it that good in the first place.  

[D-Mac Double]

Quote
Originally posted by: KDR_11k
You know what, f#ck them, let your coders do the voiceovers. Works pretty well, companies like Blizzard produced fairly good stuff without hiring actual actors. Actually compared to the performances of actual actors the coders seem to be much better at the job. The actors say they deserve the pay because they only get one or two jobs a month. Well, maybe you should get a real job, then!

Oh yeah, and while we're at it, let the animators do the voices for all cartoons. They know how to talk, so they could do voice acting, right? ...Right?

I beg to differ.

Voice acting can either greatly add, or detract from a game's presentation, and using coders with no experience for the job is really a "hit a miss" decision. More often than not, a miss.

Ooh, by the way, I looked up many VAs from Blizzard's games on the IMDb. Quite a few of them seem to have a pretty good amount of VA experience.

However, I will agree that I hate situations like XIII, where companies pay barrels of money to celebrities so a few idiots can go "OMG this has David Duchovny!! BUY!!" rather than hiring  someone who specializes in voice acting, and knows how to (or at least cares enough to) deliver lines with the proper emotion and tone. The exact same thing has been happening in animated films for many many years.    

[KDR_11k]

Bloodworth: Um, the devs already get a share of the profits because they're on salary. Giving them a cut calculated from the sales numbers would only mean they'd be afraid of working on the licensed games and other guranteed non-hits. The way it is now the grunts get their money, whether the game was a failure or not because the company makes up for the losses of one game with the profits of another. So if you're working on the next GTA you might not get more but at least you get paid even when you're working on Catwoman 2. Residuals are for contract workers because they aren't employed longer than the project lasts. Sallaried employees already get "residuals" because a profitable title means their company isn't going tits-up and won't need to "restructure" to reduce losses.

[Ian Sane]

Personally I just think it's f*cking ridiculous that actors, who can negotiate their own contracts and thus get paid different amounts of money, have a union.  Unions are for workers who do the same basic job for the same pay.  The ability to negotiate an individual contract contradicts with the concept of a union.  Professional sports unions are the same idea and it pisses me off since they basically just pick and choose whatever benefits from being a union or non-union worker that they want.

I agree with Daniel though in that the artists that create the game should get some percentage of profits.  I don't know about everybody but the designers (ie: the creative talent) of major hit games should be stinking rich.  But then it's kind of hard to determine who "creative talent" is with something like a game considering how many people are involved.  It's not exactly as simple as song writing credit.

[vudu]

This is why Nintendo should continue to not use voice actors for its games.

[D-Mac Double]

Quote
Originally posted by: vudu
This is why Nintendo should continue to not use voice actors for its games.

Why? Because their minimum wage was increased?  Riiiight.

Charles Martinet is a voice actor.  
And, um, do you play Super Smash Bros with the volume muted?

There are so many reasons why actors have unions, aside from pay issues. They include on-set safety regulations, and also help ensure child actors aren't overworked and underpaid.  

[RABicle]

If they're getting better pay I expect better acting.

[KDR_11k]

D-Mac Double: Hey, if it means no more stupid voice samples in Mario games I'm all for it.

The little voice acting that's there could probably be done by the dev team and few would notice because the samples are too short to express any emotion at all. I mean, we already know who would do the voice for Link.

[Nephilim]

most of nintendo's voices are done buy a small bunch of japanese people
this agreement is a hollywood type thing, like it said before, its they see it as too expensive, they will do it oversea's... example: lucas arts could use george lucas australian studio's

[jasonditz]

You guys are all reading way too much into this.

This is not a law, its not a "minimum wage", nor is it something which will effect all games using voice talent in the US.

If you're a game maker and don't want to pay these rates... don't hire voice actors that are members of these groups.

[KDR_11k]

I've heard that quite a few companies were attacked by the union because they used their own employees for voice acting, the union demanded that the programmers, etc join the union. In capitalist America, you don't go to the Union, the Union comes to you!

[jasonditz]

Its not like the union has any legal recourse though. They're just doing the same thing the UAW does, which is piss and moan because something's not going their way.

[KDR_11k]

Either way I'd rather see the money spent on an orchestra for the score instead of voice acting. MIDI samples have nothing on an orchestra.

[Caillan]

I agree, KDR. Though as long as they're at a high enough standard, 'amateur' orchestras such as Nintendo's own would make a fine replacement. Professional orchestras have a tendency to leave the preformance lacking because they don't have long to get used to the pieces (usually they are sight-reading them for the recording or have only practiced for a few hours beforehand). Often they play mechanically because the musicians don't have to play it with passion; they're just doing their job. If you love the music for itself you'll play it better. That's why some of the best orchestra's in the world are amateur.

[jasonditz]

Hell, you could do better than most games' musical scores in Garage Band with the orchestral pack

[xts3]

Quote
Originally posted by: jasonditz
Hell, you could do better than most games' musical scores in Garage Band with the orchestral pack

I wouldn't go that far, designing good music for a game is complicated.  Good game music lasts for years (think Nubuo Uematsu, Jeremy Soule, etc), especially when you are going to hear it hundreds of times in the game, so it better be good that it doesn't grate on your nerves after many hours.  Game music is listened to and used differently (outside of cinematic events, etc) then music in other mediums, i.e. background music should never suck so bad that you have to turn it off and it should never get on your nerves or drive you crazy after you've heard it the hundredth time.

[KDR_11k]

He wasn't talking about composition but execution.