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.
