Good.
One of my good friends was one of the voices on LA Noire years ago and gets zero residuals from it. It’s maddening.
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What people might not catch is that this isn’t artists, designers or engineers. It’s voice actors only. I’m all for people getting what they deserve but as I see voice actors in the games industry demand profit sharing and more rights, I’m reminded that those who actually make the games don’t get that. They have overtime without pay.
Voice actors are among “those who actually make the games.” Voice acting in particular also is strenuous work that can and does cause physical injury when workers are compelled to work long hours doing rough voices and so on. People end up having to have surgery on their vocal cords.
We don’t need to devalue voice actors to value other game industry workers. The only difference is the voice actors organized first, probably because of the injury risk, and when you form a union you have to define a group that you can reach and coordinate. It shouldn’t be an us vs them among works.
Don’t forget mocap. A lot of actors are doing mocap for games now, which also potentially results in injury.
This also includes stunt workers (who do the more intensive motion capture work) and stunt coordinators, many of whom are in the Screen Actors Guild already.
They should then let engineers, artists, and designers in their union.
They need to unionize too. Also count actors are included in the “actually make the games” group. Everyone should be paid well, don’t drag a group trying to fix that down because the rest aren’t doing anything.
My bad I didn’t mean to imply they don’t work on the game.
Voice actors have a union.
Designers and engineers generally don’t. Yet.
for those in america, CWA, Communication Workers of America, is a union that’s trying to reach out to the developers in the game industry
I’m reminded that those who actually make the games don’t get that. They have overtime without pay.
Yes, capitalism fucks everyone every day unless you fight for what you deserve, usually for decades, and even then only getting half of it. It’s surprising that keeping this in mind requires reminders.
A better deal for one group helps the rest of them by setting precedent.
Well maybe every one should be getting a Lil slice? Ehh
Yeah, that’s how I run my studio.
I think they asked for that in the last strike, but I haven’t seen it mentioned in this one. And some speculated it was only included for something they could drop in the eventual resolution as a form of compromise.
I never wondered about the conditions of videogames workers, but I’m really happy that they get better thanks to this movement !
It’s 10x worse than whatever you’re imagining.
No guarantee anything gets better yet.
And there’s no reason to think it will
Correct me if I’m wrong, but since this strike is against certain companies and not some entity that represents the entire industry like it does for movies and television, that means that other individual companies who come to an agreement can still hire these people, right? If so…imagine if we had that in movies and television.
We do. A24, for instance, is still making a couple movies by agreeing to work under the proposed terms by SAG. As far as I know, no one else has made such agreements yet. The more of such exceptions that get made, the weaker the AMPTP’s position will get.
Dropout.tv(formerly CollegeHumour) is also an unstruck company.One more reason to love dropout!
I didn’t know that! I just subbed to their service for Make Some Noise so I kind of feel better about shelling out for it now.
Oh, I see. I thought all of Hollywood was AMPTP and that’s why we can’t have nice things like DRM-free movie purchases.
Either everyone needs to get royalties or nobody does.
Pay your voice actors right the first time instead of paying them shit per line. Or if your video game becomes an astounding success, all 1,000 people get a slice of that 100,000,000 million it made in sales via residuals. A cool $100,000 for everyone!
Don’t forget to advocate for yourself even if you have a union. Nobody ever gets paid more by saying nothing.
or nobody does
Be careful, Disney might like that idea
Great. Their CEO can make $2,000,000 / year and the rest $100,000 capping their maximum pay at 20x their lowest paid employee.
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How so?
I wonder how many are actually in union to gain that bargain power?
I know most if not all of the cast of Critical Role (who are voice actors for many video games) are members. Ashley Johnson is the voice of Ellie for TLoU, so if they’re working on TLoU3, they’ll likely have to delay it.
I was hoping this extends to many other departments.
It doesn’t, unfortunately. Programmers, animators, concept artists, designers, each need to unionize in order to leverage collective action grants at the bargaining table. With last week’s decision by the NLRB though, it’s certain to be easier than ever to get unionized. Still, the amount of coordination it gets to even petition the NLRB to have your union recognized is no small feat. Just now it’ll be that much more difficult to bust a union election
