Video Game Actors Say They Don't Get Their Due

Dekortage writes "The New York Times reports today about Michael Hollick, the actor who provided the voice of Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto IV. Although the game has made more than $600 million in sales for Rockstar Games, Hollick earns nothing beyond the original $100K he was paid. If this was television, film, or radio, Hollick and the other GTA actors could have made millions by now. Hollick says, 'I don't blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games. Yes, the technology is important, but it's the human performances within them that people really connect to, and I hope actors will get more respect for the work they do within those technologies.' Is it time for video game actors to be treated as well as those in other mediums?"

Comments

If he did not like the terms...

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

... then why did he sign the contract? Had he not heard of all the previous GTAs enough to know that GTA IV would be a huge success?

Re:"creative people"?

[Anonymous Coward]

As game developers, we're already bound that way if we use any Screen Actors Guild members. If you use one, you have to use only SAG talent, or you'll be blacklisted and never get to use any SAG talent ever again.

Unions suck. Please don't get them any deeper into my industry than they already are.

As far as being paid points off the back end goes, if you're not that central to the project, don't expect a slice of the profits.

because those guys at the end

[Shivetya]

of the credits DON'T COUNT.

Amazed people haven't figured it out. These "actors" are the center of the universe, the rarely having completed high school know it alls", the ones who will solve all the worlds problems by jetting there and handing out candy bars"

The people with the grunt work, the programmers, cameramen, gaffers, q&A, and such, well they are just doing a job any chimp could do.

Honestly why should we expect any less of a comment from the likes of this guy? It is quite possible he is good person and generally fun to be around, but the number of these dicksperts that get on the tube and tell us how wonderful they are and how special they are and such and such is beyond number. Hell I take many of their recommendations in the completely opposite fashion...

Re:Keep fighting, but be realistic

[rickkas7]

The guy made $ 1,050 per day for about 95 days over 15 months to make about $ 100,000. Software developers probably made more than that in 15 months, but they had to work about 325 days. I'm feeling no sympathy.

Re:Keep fighting, but be realistic

[Surt]

That is grossly untrue. I've worked for 3, including Blizzard, and that was not remotely true. I would guess that no single programmer has contributed more than 20% of the codebase for a AAA title in the last 10 years.

Re:Keep fighting, but be realistic

[merreborn]

Back when John Carmack gained his fame, entire video games were produced by 3-4 people.

I know a guy who worked at Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts) in the 80's. He recently went back for their 25th anniversary party, and talked about his experiences there at the time. He worked on some Commodore 64 games at the time, usually with maybe one other engineer. He was responsible for pretty much everything -- writing the memory manager, networking code, graphics, etc. etc.

At lunch, the kid he sat next to was responsible for wood and ice simulation in the new star wars game -- and nothing else. They said rendering a single pixel in that game required about as much memory as a whole commodore 64 had -- 32k.

So yeah, game development has changed dramatically.

Re:Keep fighting, but be realistic

[Cathoderoytube]

You have no idea.
I'm a professional animator, and I have to say voice actors can be an extreme pain in the ass. They do about an hours worth of work but make more money than everybody else in the production. The last show I worked on the lead voice actor put well over 300 people out of work for 2 months while he re-negotiated his contract. They're so self absorbed and disconnected from the reality that they think they're the only important aspect of the production. On top of all that when the bleeder finally did agree to come back to work, they had to fire several people just to make up for the extra money they were giving this guy.

So really, I have zero sympathy for voice actors.