Voice acting is pretty important to the presentation of any game, and celebrity voice actors included as part of the marketing do happen. Voice acting can also be rather intensive and time consuming work that is often underappreciated. Not just anyone can do voice acting. Even live action actors can be awful at it. Anyone remember Peter Dinklage from Destiny?

So if they want better conditions...any royalties...go right on ahead. I much prefer good voice acting in my games to horrible voice acting. I'm glad we've got loads of VA talent working in this industry now. I still remember the dark days of Sonic Adventure and Shenmue's awkward delivery, Resident Evil's downright bad VA, and the SEGA janitors who must've done their House of the Dead games. I remember the days when MGS2's stilted acting was IMPRESSIVE, rather than just okay. Though I personally don't need stories and dialogue in my games to enjoy them, I much prefer that they be done well. So if some of the people want better conditions and royalties for their work, it's fine by me.

And since I'm not satisfied with my own opinion, here's an infinitely better one from Jim Sterling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BzDtjGyRRQ

Oh Wesley Crusher

I'm just thinking of the average persons job, the graft the average person has to put in and what they get in return. It looks like these voice actors are pissed that they aren't getting what A list Hollywood celebrities are getting in terms of money and glamour and one of the ways of achieving this is through what they are doing now.

The jobs that caretakers have, emergency services, cashiers, toilet cleaners, bin men etc I think are a lot harder and pay a lot less, and people are far less appreciative of what the average person does in their job, and here you have these complaints in an industry where the developers and publishers often struggle themselves to make a profit and these guys want to kick up a fuss. I say bring on the replacements and let these lot strike.

Okay, so I read through their simple list of demands, and here are two things that I feel can fuck right off:

The royalty pay is stupid. They already get paid plenty, and the fact that they want to siphon more money out of the gaming industry is absurd. Of course, they only want to take money from games that sell two million or more copies, which as was already pointed out, may not even be the break even point for AAA releases that only experience further rising costs. The royalties are a shortsighted and blatantly greedy demand that should have never made it into the list. Oh boo hoo, I'm so damn sorry that you only had to work for 50 hours total to make more than I'll make in months, if not a year or more depending on the voice actor and role.

The "vocal stress" bit is pretty dumb too. I'm sorry, but I don't think you deserve more money because you had to do a scream take. If every line was screaming in a game, I could see it. Otherwise just drink a glass of water and you'll be fine. I have played zero games where screaming is anywhere near as common as normal conversation. This is another demand I see as fairly shortsighted with no real evidence to go along with it. Quit trying to find excuses to bleed the game industry for more money.

Now, better safety for potentially dangerous motion capture stunts? That's legit. It shouldn't cost that much more to take proper safety measures, and quite frankly, I'm surprised that wasn't normal already. As motion capture becomes increasingly common for action titles, safety precautions need to be taken into account.

Transparency should also be fine too. Draw up a contract that lists the exact conditions under which recordings may be used. That also seems like a fairly common sense thing, although I could see how it wouldn't have mattered that much even a decade ago when video game voice acting still wasn't that major of a thing on a quality level. I mean, previously, the only place voice acting would get used was the game anyways. These days though, I can see transparency being more pertinent.

The fact that 50% of their proposal is "give us more money for bs reasons", I'm not entirely sympathetic to their cause. If they had left out the greed, they wouldn't have had to strike to begin with. The amount of money people insist on having when they already make more than most of the general population absolutely baffles me.

Improve working conditions, increase pay for lead roles, royalties can gtfo.

That's how I think this should go down. If not, we're gonna end up with amateur voice acting and devs doing voice work like in the old days.

You're saying I'm incorrect because "the internet" disagrees with me? In my estimation "the internet" is usually on the wrong side of any issue because most of the people who are vocal on the internet are speaking from a position of ignorance or at best partial knowledge which leads them down the path of error. So your argument that the actrors don't have a legit case because the internet disagrees is very thin on reason. I might agree that the actors made a mistake in not getting the general public on side, but that in no way impacts the legitimacy of their claim. And at the end of the day, it might be that the actors have no need of the force of public opinion behind them, so if they get more or less what they want having the public against them makes no difference and indeed going to any effor to get the public onside would be a waste of time and effort. We'll see I guess, but I do know some of the deeper thinkers among the gameing media agree in principle with the actors, even if they don't necessarily agree on some of the points of detail.

How about, instead of invoking the opinion of the internet, you actually lay out rational reasons for why video games should be different from film and TV in terms of the principle of residuals for actors, recognising that residuals are a reality for actors in these other formats and therefore the actors have precedent to back up their claim. Leaving aside the detials of what should and should not trigger residual payments, what is the reason for why actors should be denied any and all residuals?

At a minimum, actors should definitely get residuals when their voice work is re-used. If a game is remade some years after the original is released, the actors should get residuals for the re-use of their voice work. It is, after all, much cheaper to pay the original VAs residuals than to hire a whole new voice cast as part of the remake.

I haver plenty of artist friends, including actors, some doing well and others struggling. I support their claim that residuals are an important part of the compensation for an artist's work provided the finer details are tailored to the industry concerned. If you think all residuals for actors are wrong, including TV and film residuals then OK I can respect the consistency of your opinion, though I would disagree. But if you think video games should be specifically exempt, then you will need to explain your inconsistency.

I think what a lot of people are forgetting here is that the ones who will make the decision about anything are shareholders. All shareholders want is as much money as possible, so when you ask them "will you give a cut of each games profit to these voice actors", the first question they will ask is "can you replace them?".

The industry is the way it is because shareholders demand large profits as fast as possible. If they could release 5 games a year in the same franchise they would do (see sonic as a good example of franchise self destruction). They are not going to accept losing anything on their dividend without good reason. I'd love if most developers and people who work on games in a core role got something from the games sales as well as better working conditions, but as long as these are publicly traded companies, chances of it happening are next to zero. We're in an age when a series creator is seen as replaceable when they complain their creation is being mined to within an inch of it's life. Everyone is replaceable in games, even the guys who created COD, assassin's creed and MGS. I do not see this going the way that the unions think it will.

There is option B though, a company I worked at years back had a strike over temporary workers getting more pay, all my boss did was signed the union contract as a stopgap and then didn't hire unionised employees again, they got their cash short term but after that were unemployable. I remember him saying 'there is a saying in the east: short term profit at long term cost'. He changed company contracts which locked out any one who was a member of a union from getting a job at his company.

Another good example of this is Murdoch, during the 80s workers kept going on strike at his printing facility for UK paper The Sun, he built a new plant over a year, hired new workers with different contracts and went into the old plant one day and told everyone they were fired.

I've considered that this might be a simple negotiating tactic, but the underlying point stands: if they cared about appearing greedy in the public mind, then they made an obvious error.

For what it's worth, I don't believe public perception will have as much impact in this dispute as it does with other forms of entertainment.

Not quite; it's a citation to the only currently available indicator of public opinion. Which in this case actually matters because...

Except that's not what the argument is. At all. The issue is solely, and I repeat:

"Let's set aside whether or not voice actors should be entitled to royalties for videogames... ka-pi complained that demanding royalties makes the voice actors' guild "look greedy or whatever."

Then boom, we might be done here, seeing as that was the sole topic in that discussion.

Actors in film are usually tied very closely to the commercial success of a project.  Tom Cruise is worth millions, perhaps billions of dollars more than a no-name actor who is just as good at acting.  In gaming, the development studios are the stars.  People buy games because of who made them, not because of who provided the voices.

Logic should have more do to with this than "that's how it's done in other industries."  That's not being inconsistent, that's just being realistic.  In my opinion, the argument that they deserve it is the argument that has to prove itself.  Just because it's done that way elsewhere does not mean it should be done that way everywhere.  Why do voice actors in games deserve residuals?   "Because live action," or, "because artists deserve more than everyone else," fail for me as reasons.

Looks like Nintendo strategy of having few if any voice actors is paying off.