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Games Losing Their Voices
Gamespot is reporting on a possible SAG strike against the video game industry. The working contract that the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has with the major game publishers expires tomorrow and negotiations are still underway. From the article: "Academy-Award winner Charlize Theron will lend her voice to Majesco's Aeon Flux, David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson voice-act original characters for Midway's upcoming Area 51, and Sean Connery will do some Bond-speak for EA's recently announced From Russia With Love. Actors are even voicing from beyond the grave--the late Marlon Brando will join James Caan and Robert Duvall in Electronic Arts' digital version of The Godfather."
This may, in the end, be good for the games industry; removing the advantage of a big development to hog the limelight by parading big name actors on their game boxes, and giving a tiny bit more of a chance for smaller game houses, who rely on gameplay to sell their games, to grab a piece of the pie.
However, this is another example of a big money union crossing the line. While SAG is acting perfectly within its bounds, it is completely pissing on the spirit in which the union were founded.
Unions are there to protect the workers, not to be dicks.
maybe we'll see some Japanese games with a sub track now. Tales of Destiney II was absoulutely ruined by bad voice acting.
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Dont get me wrong , i am very much pro union in some situations, However the SAG is an example of why some unions are seen as abusive groups of organised criminals. . .
A union is there for one reason , to protect the rights of the workers
Now this does not include boycotting a small company who hires non-union workers..
Fair enough to boycot the studio if it hires people during a strike but this is just silly.
Perhaps back in the day the Screen actors guild was used to right a few wrongs(I have my doubts) but now all they do is keep the exclusive club going and try to hike up wages for the elite
(/Rant)
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Voice acting is the biggest source of crap in video games. I think it was the first or second expansion to Dungeon Siege where the first NPC opens his mouth and you reach for the sound settings. Frankly I'm surprised that any members of SAG do any voice acting for video games. I would have though it's the boss' son and the janitor. (No offense to janitors, you're just the best example of a staff member that has the least to do with core business.)
Why the hell do they pay large sums of money to pay some actors for voice overs in games. its ridiculous. The gameplay quality of games is going down, games have far too many bugs to be addressed after being released, throw the money at the developers so they can fix bug, improve on mod tools and just have more time and money to develop a good game. Hell I could do voice overs for cheap.
Hollywood just doesnt get it. I cant wait for photrealism. Love to see all these useless millionaire actors trying to actually get a real job.
Seriously the SAG can go eat it. Good riddance imo, the only thing that might suffer for this is games based on movie and television francises, and considering the majority of games based on movies arent exactly that great I could care less.
You dont need some A-list twat and his whiney union strongarming the video game industry. Sorry bucko Joe "20million a movie" isnt needed to make a good game, there is plenty of voice actors that arent apart of the SAG that are good that would love to have these jobs.
Michael Jackson will be playing Zelda in the next Zelda game. Paris Hilton will be playin as an unknown guy in the next DoA Game. And last but certinly not least, Mel Gibson will be playing as one of the greater minions of hell in the next expansion pack to Doom
The worst part of all of this is the fact that without these famous names doing voices, the quality of these games is going to fall drastically. Can you imagine playing a game without recognizable voices in it? Man, if only there were people out there that could, you know, kinda, mimic famous people. If only someone could sound like sean connery...
Don't Blame me if I seem bitter, I'm at work, and the TV only plays soap operas.
Take the money you would pay these actors and put it towards quality testing up front and less time towards patching buggy releases.
Meet the new sig, same as the old sig
I'd actually like to here Will Wheton's perspective on this.
NO!
I hope the games industry fights back. If anyone should be getting any royalties, its the people who actually worked on the games like programmers, designers, animators etc. Sure, thats not gonna happen any time soon. Hopefully, the big evil that is EA can do some good here. They probably dont want to pay these actors any royalties, and arguably they provide the SAG with the biggest amount of work (heck, can't recall any recent EA game without big name actors), so hopefully they'll have some influence in the matter.Unions are there to protect the unions. They used to be there to protect the workers, and they attracted leaders who were concerned with protecting the workers. Then they grew large ...
As the son and grandson of blue collar union members, and as a person who has materially benefited from the original ideals of unionization, I'll add that a large part of the problem is that union won their war but did not demobilize. Nearly all their legitimate issues are enshrined in law. Now they largely exist to preserve themselves and their power.
The occassional exception where they actually do something useful would be the "Save a job, buy American" type public relations campaigns. We bitch and moan about about jobs being exported and blame the government and corporations but the simple truth is that it is our own damn fault. We tend to buy whatever costs less. The union's modern battle is with the public not government and corporations. Well, that is if they were interested in protect their workers.
I can't really think of a game that bragged about its celebrity voice actors and didn't suck.
Also, hire amateur scabs like me to do the voice work, I'd love to do it! Pity there aren't many (any?) game development houses in Ottawa (although there are lots about two hours away in Montréal).
- chrish
Join F.A.G, ban Team America!
I'll never be able to hear anything about the Screen Actor's Guild without thinking of George Clooney puppets and "Matt Damon!"
-JP
Last year I worked at a Talent Agency that speacialized in Voice Overs (VO). A few of our guys had done some games. I got into a conversation with one guy who had done a bunch of the russain and italian mobsters for Max Payne 2. He told me he put in a full day at the studio doing these voices, and only got scale.
VO actors thrive on being able to do multiple sessions in one day. They studio hop, and although each gig pays less than an on-camera gig would, they make it up in the numbers.
Since video games are a little more like films, they take more time, and therefore these guys should be getting paid more.
IIRC, there are two major brackets for scale right now: On-Camera and VO. I'm willing to bet that Video Games will get their own bracket, and they will be somewhere in between the OC (about $700 a day, and that means the full day) and the VO (about $450 a day, per session, which are typically just an hours or two)
I know I would rather have good voice acting from a noname actor rather than getting mediocre voice acting from A-list celebrities. (And by noname actors, I mean the experienced voice actors in the field. I know there are a lot of people in the voice acting field who are pretty prominant, but don't have any recognition outside of that circle). I don't care that the Olsen twins have a handfull of lines in some game that are delivered in a flat monotone voice. I don't feel any particular attachment to a game just because they stuff it with celebrities, with one exception - franchise games which have specific actors for each character. I appreciate it when a Star Trek game has Patrick Stewart doing the voice of Picard, or James Earl Jones does the voice of Darth Vader. Other than that, I don't care who does the voices, and would prefer talent over glitz. Doing voice acting is quite different than regular acting. Regular actors are used to being able to express themselves in their facial expression and actors, but voice actors have a real talent in being extremely expressive using only their voice.
...is that they're making a Godfather game!
I wonder...will you have to sneak into the stables to decapitate Khartoum? Get extra points for keeping your mouth shut while dad talks to Solozzo?
I see it now. You start the game as Enzo, the baker. You are done a favor by Don Corleone, allowing you to get married and stay in the country, but returning the favor becomes more of an ordeal than you had imagined! Baking Pies, fighting off hitmen, and avenging the death of your father-in-law to make your bones...could be interesting.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
That way you don't have to hire the actors to do the voice over and over again. After all, it works for Ananova pretty well.
BTW Anaova uses Rhetorical's rVoice Studio, which allows your own voice to be used to generate dialogues.
On a real TV or movie set, the actors' union, along with the writers' union, the Teamsters, and whatever other unions are involved in the careers of the cast and crew all go to bat for one another, to ensure that a union shop is union to the core.
Where's this support in the games industry? Why isn't SAG lobbying EA employees to get them to unionize? Why are programmers, designers, artists, and musicians regarded as second-class citizens by SAG as compared to the writers, directors, set designers, cinematographers, and foley artists of the screen entertainment domain?
And by that I mean...
A contract analogous to the one SAG currently has with the big movies studios, if used with the gaming industry, would pretty much limit A-list actors to big-budget game titles.
While I'm not entirely familiar with the business of games, I do know that the majority of them don't make the bulk of their money after initial release (like, say, big-budget movies, which routinely don't make real profits until the DVD sales). Also, while I'm sure many game companies will be happy to cough up for actors, it would become much rarer. I'd imagine anyone who isn't EA or Atari would be likely to just say "Fuck this" and go non-union. SAG and the movie studios have each other in a sort of goofy stranglehold due to the nature of the art form & the business (the details are basically this: you can't work on a non-indie movie if you're not SAG, so actors desperately work small movies to get into SAG so they can get into big movies), but games by no means need SAG actors to get made.
So basically... if SAG gets what they're asking for (as presented in this article), it doesn't hurt 95% of game companies, and locks out 99.9% of actors who want to work in games (and there are quite a lot of them).