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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?"
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.'
I respect the work that these people do, but come on. I think this guy might be stretching it a bit. People don't buy video games for an actor in the same way they go see a movie for an actor in it. It is a completely different medium. Besides, voice actors in video games right now are pioneers. They will have to fight for a while before they get the recognition and money that they expect. Just like Hollywood actors did.
Why should voice actors get a percentage for a few days of work? What about all the programmers, artists and the like that spent 50 or 60 hours per week working on the game? 100k doesn't seem like a meager pay.
Did he not agree to the (generous) salary? His union doesn't have the royalty deals Hollywood has had in place for ages, but look how those have turned out: voodoo bookkeeping to try to work around those royalties. And do the game's programmers and artists not deserve a percent of the sales as well? Bleh... I can see a decent argument to be made for profit sharing of a game's sales with the team that made it, but this guy just comes off like an ass.
you provide time and a service in return for a pre-negotiated payment.
if he feels he didn't get paid enough, he shouldn't have taken the job. he can't blame the union now. obviously he's so famous he could have gotten work somewhere else and earned more, right?
if he think he wouldn't have gotten the job if he held out for more money, well, that's how it works. if you provide a service that anybody else can provide (reading from a script), then your pay will not approach 7 digits. i can't go to my boss now and ask for 300k/yr, when i can be easily replaced.
You were hired to do a job and you got 100k for it. Shut up and be glad you have a job in this economy. It always pissed me off how actors say that they 'deserve' millions on millions of dollars for their 4 hours of work a day. I'd be happy to see this trend not extend into the video game industry.
... voice actors don't add that much to a game, the fact that he got 100,000 (more then most people make in a year) for the teeniest amount of work compared to the average worker, is just fucking appalling.
I'd rather give those bonus's to the dev's that actually deserve it who spend 60-70 hours a week, then to some greedy VA, who does jack shit, when compared to the massive engineering that coders and artists and others on the team have to do.
VA's do not add anywhere near the value that the actual team does, they're spoilt and the game industry should not cater to these fucks. I'd rather hire amateur VA's off the street then some hollywood fucktard.
Tentacle 1: I don't think you should drink that, it looks bad for you!
Tentacle 2: Nonsense! It makes me feel great! Smarter... it makes me feel like I could... like I could... TAKE ON THE WORLD! (cue ominous organ music)
Then again, I wouldn't have a clue who were the voice actors.
$100k? How can you expect anyone to live on that? Where's the union when you need it the most?
U+F8FF
I would make a bet that he got paid more than the creative developers working 16 hours a day on the game implementation, and developers don't even have a union either.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Look no further. Hey, a pile o'money, how come it's not mine.
\u262D = \u5350
How long does it take to do the work? 6 months? A Year? Two to three years?
I'd say that for a year or less of work, 100-grand is good money. If it's more than a year, then depending on the actual work/hours involved, perhaps he should be getting more. However, a million bucks? Maybe big-name actors make this much, but that doesn't automatically entitle video-game actors to the same. Moreover, I'm not really sure how much movie voice-actors make, but that would be a closer comparison.
Sorry bud, but that's the way the industry works. If I write a piece of software for my company which they resell to clients, all I get is my original paycheque (perhaps a bonus if they're feeling generous). Just because some other overpaid smoe is making a million buckazoids or more doesn't automatically entitle you to that type of cash any more than it does me or the various others that work their butts off for a living.
Fat short italian plumber dresses in red and stages protest in front of Nintendo office in Rome to claim unpaid billions.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Is this guy for real? He wants royalties on a video game that he voice acted for?
Let me get this straight...this no-name actor comes in about halfway into the development of the game, gets a script, gets into a recording studio and records some voice for a period of a few weeks, two months tops, and gets paid $100,000 for it, and now he's complaining that he's not getting royalties for the game?
What about the programmers, artists, and designers who worked at the company for years from beginning to end of the development of this game, and near the end of the development cycle worked every saturday and some sundays, and worked 10-14 hours per day to get the game done in time?
Games are different from movies and TV shows. In film, actors are central to the product, in games, they're secondary, they're flavor that the developers of the game can choose to put in, but don't need in order to sell the game. The people central to video game development are the people who work on making the game itself. If anyone deserves royalties on the game, its these people, because they put in way more effort than a few weeks of reading lines off a sheet of paper.
bring in hundred of thousands in unit game sales with your name then you can whine. Right now, you could sub that voice out with any other and it would not make one difference in sales. For the closest approximation think Mark Hamill who did video cut scenes for the Wing Commander games back in the mid-90s. People bought that game because he was a part of it, he can ask for royalties. If they made another GTA IV with the same Niko character but with a different voice actor would it matter? Heck no because I don't play the game for the voices, I play for the gameplay.
Would this actor have been willing to return the $100K (or more) if the game had lost money?
If someone wants to share in the rewards of a blockbuster products, they need to be willing to share in the losses from flops.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
If Hollick's union wanted to play silly buggers, someone would have to explain to me why I would want to employ a union actor.
Successful unions usually do all they can to ensure everybody in their fields joins them, and those who don't get no work. I deal with unions all the time and often they are worse than the mafia. In many places, you can't hold a job for long or get promoted if you don't join the union and obey.
In short: if a video game actor's union is created, you quickly won't be able to employ a non-union actor at all.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Contrast that to movies or television where people go to see movies and watch television shows because of the actors and actresses involved. People will go to see a movie with Angelina Jolie in it because she's so damn hot and the studios know this so they hire her, and she knows this so she charges $20M.
Now to this guy's credit as near as I can tell he's not saying "I was robbed and deceived", he's just saying "gee, I was the main actor in a game which has made $500M, it would be nice if I had been paid more." With all due respect, you didn't get paid more because you're a nobody. I'm not trying to be mean - but you're not George Clooney, you're someone who did soap operas to this point. You did an excellent job, and you were helped by the "Pixar Effect" of using a high quality but unknown actor to avoid distractions. But you were paid the amount you were because you're an unknown. Heck, you got paid a lot more than the average person does in a year, and I doubt this was the only gig you had. If they ever make a sequel to this game and reuse your character (unlikely, since like the Final Fantasy franchise they change characters and settings entirely from game to game) then renegotiate for more money. But in the meantime, just enjoy the fame and likelihood of getting future work.
Schnapple
He signed the contract. He knew the terms going into it. He is actually very lucky since voice actors are pretty easy to find and have low standards for compensation. His role in this game will get him all kinds of work he would not have gotten otherwise.
And his voice is not an integral part of the game. Any halfway competent voice actor would have sufficed. The real stars are the programmers and designers.
Voice actors are unionised. So he can't haggle for his own contract, but he has to agree to one that the industry and unions have worked out previously. If he wants percentages, he'd have to leave the union (and then be fairly unemployable) or get the union to renegotiate its contracts (which I guess is what the whole point of the article is).
QuantumPete
... 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?
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.
Have you considered negotiating for yourself? That's what I do when I get a job.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Then, as a teacher, I can claim residuals on the income of every student who has ever sat in my classroom. I mean hey, they wouldn't be where they are now if not for me! I deserve a percentage of their success! Where did I leave that number for my union rep?
That first Tauren actor that Blizzard hired only received 3 coppers and a stack of Peacebloom for a snack.
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.
Not russian, serbian. I am serbian. His accent is ok. They need to tone it down otherwise no one understand him!
Although the game has made more than $600 million in sales for Rockstar Games, Hollick earns nothing beyond the original $100K he was paid.
A hundred thousand fucking dollars for reading out loud? How long did he have to read to earn that hundred thousand dollars? Poor little baby. I work all goddamned year long for half that much. That's twice what my house is worth!
I've never seen a hundred thousand dollars!
How much did the programmers get? I'll bet they didn't get a hundred grand each!
The asshole signed a contract and he was paid what he was offered. If he thinks a hundred grand isn't enough, then he shouldn't do any more video games.
I'm sick of the God damned money worshiping greed today. Hollick can kiss my ass.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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...
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I see one big problem here. Games, unlike say, Victrola music, are more difficult and time consuming to "transfer" to newer technologies. For every Tomb Raider on GameTap there is a System Shock and System Shock 2 (bad examples I know). With so little "roll-over content" what is the purpose of the sending out residual checks on something that probably won't be selling 20 years from now.
I guess my point is that the game business isn't built like the movie or music business and it should be very wary of going the way of the beloved MPAA or RIAA.
It doesn't work that way for programmers, Q/A, artists, etc. FAR too many projects start off with modest goals and reasonable timelines, only to hit "crunch time" a couple months into the 18-month schedule when the real scope becomes clear.
I've seen people in the game industry work themselves into the hospital, hallucinate from fatigue, neglect their families, and sacrifice their personal life in order to meet absurd schedules that were mandated long after the initial work agreement. After a cycle or two, they burn out and leave the industry and another starry-eyed crop of newbies takes their place.
No sympathy from this corner.
GTA games aren't really big on the whole 'advertising real products' thing. Pretty much every product in the game is fictional, or a fictitious parody of an existing product.
For example, in Need For Speed underground, you'll get race text messages on your Cingular cellphone/PDA. In GTA IV, you get text messages on your 'Whiz' phone.
Maybe you were thinking of Crackdown?
I would hate not to have a choice on what Union I join. In Belgium there is no union per profession. You have different unions who have different branches.
Also each company with more then 50 employees MUST have a union representative(s) who everybody (even non-union workers) can vote for.
Nobody in the company care whether I am a member of a union or not.
So if I would not like how one union represented me, I would be able to go to an other. Choice matters.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Maybe it's because Nico Bellic is not russian but from ex-Yougoslavia?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
To those who suggest the actor is a whiner, reread the post. He appropriately blames the union for not including these kinds of positions appropriately in their collective bargaining efforts.
Basically, many companies in the video game industry, a young(ish) business currently more or less an oligopoly, are making well above what would be considered normal profits. Barriers to entry are high, so I would anticipate they will continue to make above-normal profits for some time.
The music industry, movie industry, and sports industry, among others, have gone through the same dynamic and the video game industry will doubtless see many of the same growing pains they have and be subject to the same kinds of bargaining dynamics. And in situations like this, with well-above-normal profits being generated, those who add significant economic value and don't use collective bargaining to claim a share of the pie are simply giving money away.
Sure, with the exception of some rock stars, the coders in the trenches aren't being paid millions, but that's not a reason the actors shouldn't be paid more. If anything, it simply indicates the coders in such industries should strive to self-organize as well as actors and athletes.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
Disclaimer: I am a member of one of the acting unions (a sister union to SAG, which is who this guy is blaming).
Before all of you hate this guy for wanting more than $100k, consider one very important aspect of actors' salaries that is usually why they get both a high daily rate and a percentage on a big project:
They don't get a salary. Once the project is over, so is their income. Their health insurance and retirement only gets contributions while they're working, and in the case of health insurance, if you don't work enough weeks out of the year (and it's a lot right now, since the health insurance funds are all in the toilet) then your boss is still paying for your heath insurance (money he could be paying you with) but you aren't getting it.
The saying goes that Actors work about 1/4 as much as regular people, but in that 1/4 of the time, they work 8 times harder. There is absolutely zero 'veg out at your desk' as an actor. You probably think it'd be a blast to have a job like voicing Nico Bellic, and in a lot of ways, it probably was - but you will tear up your voice doing the same dialog over and over again, particularly the pages and pages of 'you are caught on fire' and 'you fall off a building.'
This guy earned $100k for 16 months of work. That's pretty good, but not great. This isn't a young noob, either. He's mid-career. $75k a year for Nico Bellic?
Several people have rightly pointed out that people don't buy video games 'because of an actor' like they go see movies because of an actor. This is partially true. You don't buy a video game because a particular actor is involved (usually, though I expect Splinter Cell would be wildly unpopular if they axed the gravelly voice dude, Ironsides?). You do buy a video game because the acting & storytelling is extraordinary. Most games suffer from bad writing AND bad acting; a game that has both will review & sell well.
Obviously it's not such a large factor that these guys should get the same slice a movie star is going to get, and I'm not even sure if residuals is the way to go for video games - there's a very good case to be made that the 3d artist/lead programmer or whatever is just as important or more important. In some studios, I imagine the lead guys have shares of stock in the company and so do get residuals in their way - but even if they don't, they get a salary. They get to work on every game. The actor doesn't.
Having said all this, the unions will probably ask for too much. The actor who did Nico sounds like he's got his head on straight - he doesn't want to piss off Rockstar and he's not personally whining about it; he's allowing his case to be used to bring attention to the subject, which is pretty harmless. The question of 'when GTAIV makes a bazillion dollars, who should get what?' is a tough one and it -should- take a lot of haggling to figure that out. Even if you give Nico residuals, what about Roman? McLeary? Where do you stop?
However you solve it, keep in mind that actors typically make a crapload of money on a daily basis because they work so little of time. Last I checked, at any given time, under 5% of my union is employed.
Except Niko is not Russian, he's Serbian. Did you play the game and listen to the dialogue? If you had, this point was pretty well made.
Without the good voice actor, the video game gets bad ratings and often gets undersold. Read gamespot reviews, or ign reviews, and one of the first things they often nail a game for is bad voice acting, or heap praise for believable voice acting.
Acting (and writing) could very easily ruin the high-quality hard work of everyone else, or elevate good to great (as the writing and acting in Portal did). How much that is worth in $$$ should be negotiable, that's all Hollick is saying.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
I can understand actors wanting residuals when considering how much the company owners are raking in. $600 million in profits, I'm the voice of the character and I only get $100k? What the hell? Yet at the same time, why shouldn't the secretary get a cut of the overall profits? That coffee doesn't make itself! And then we get into lunacy land.
Overall, I think long-term royalties are a bad idea, especially because of the corporate greedheads. I think a limited copyright should exist for 15 to 20 years, then it should be dropped. That's enough time for an inventor to make money off his invention, a writer to rake it in off of his book, and then it's done. Why the hell is Jimi Hendrix making executives millions of dollars decades after he kissed the sky? Why in the fucking hell does MLK's family have rights over his name and likeness, up to and including selling it to marketing companies so they can use civil rights to turn a fucking buck selling crap?
It's the inequitable distribution of income that really rankles me. I do believe that there's a measure of reward that should be had commensurate with risk. However, when the money men are well-secured in their positions of power and are taking very little risk to finance a project, why should they earn a higher return than the people pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into the effort?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Well, there's two sides to the arguement. One is that the voice actors in video games are doing just as much work as voice actors in other mediums: Film, TV, Radio. But the reality is, they're really not as important in video games as those mediums. There was little to no voice acting in games until around 2000, and still, a great number of games (probably still the majority) contains either no voice acting or only partial voice acting. Even most games that have voice acting (GTAIV included) have subtitles at the bottom of the screen, so TECHNICALLY voiceacting isn't neccessary.
I flat-out disagree with his claim that it's the actors who bring the characters to life. Many games have been made that have wonderful character portrayal with no voiceacting. Many Japanese RPGs, for instance, relly on various methods of getting across character emotion that build up incredibly subtle character personality over time. I first played FF6 back in 2002, and found it to be one of the most moving games I'd played to date, for instance... mostly due to the writing, but also due to the timing and character plot arcs. Sure, it was simplistic, but I really felt for those people. Sometimes, voice-acting brings the characters a bit too close to reality, and all the nuances get sort of lost within the jumble between voice and body language.
The single most important thing for the portrayal of humanality in video games is character animation/body language, and facial expression. The PS1 was almost completely dead in that department (even more so than the 16-bit era), the PS2 tried, but often came across either over-the-top or not quite correct. I'm starting to see quite a few titles that are able to portray character personality and emotion with the 360, Wii, PS3, and late PS2 titles... but I think this has to do less with hardware advancement than it does a realization that those things are incredibly important. That will probably be this generation's biggist legacy. GTAIV isn't perfect in this department, but it's getting better.
So in closing, it's a tough decision. It's like any other market, you have to balance the amount of work one has done with the neccessity and effect of their having done it. Some games couldn't possibly work without voice acting... you can't have an MGS without David Hayter, for instance, and in that case, he's probably almost as much a neccessity as a TV voice/film actor. But for GTA, of which voice acting is not as much a neccessity, and characters change from game to game, it's understandable that they make less.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
We already have the precedent of big name hollywood movie stars voicing major roles in video games. Just to name a few of the most relevant, there's Ray Liotta who did the main character's voice in GTA:Vice City, Samuel L Jackson who played the main villain Officer Tenpenny in GTA:San Andreas, and James Woods who did the voice of the CIA guy in GTA:SA. I said movie stars because despite what you may think of any of them, these three guys have all starred in their own major hollywood movies. So what kind of deal did they get? Paid for the day like this Niko voice guy with no residuals? WHy would they accept that? If they had done the same exact type of work for a Pixar movie they'd get the full residual deal. From what the article said, Michael Hollick worked even harder than a typical voice actor because he did all physical acting of his character through motion capture. The businesses are so similar, and the voice acting jobs so nearly identical, I don't see why one should get residuals and the other day-labor pay. Even if it is a ton of money, the deal should be the same in all fairness. I think the Screen Actors Guild should make this point very clearly to the video game producers, that if they want to play with Hollywood actors or any professional actors, they will have to pay the fair share. All this talk about compensating the programmers and artists is besides the point. A different point to argue that would also include all the set designers and makeup artists etc, but not what this article is about.
Three words: GET OVER YOURSELF!!! I've developed visual effects software that's been used in dozens of movies. Where the hell are MY residual checks?!? Oh, and never mind the fact that I didn't get paid $100,000 for the software either. Oh, and never mind the fact that the damn "artists" whine and complain that there are no presets or that it doesn't get fancy Academy-award Winning features every two weeks for free.
Personally I don't think this guy should get more than what he initially agreed to, and I also think he's sounding a bit more arrogant for wanting more. The fact is that his employer could hire someone else and get virtually the same result, because (as many people have already said) people don't buy games for the actors.
But I certainly don't have a problem with actors getting paid a lot if it's just a case of market forces. A really good example of this is the Simpsons' voice cast, who are now earning on the order of millions of dollars per season. That's a huge amount of money for the amount of time it takes and compared with other people on the staff (such as writers and producers and animators, presumably), especially considering it doesn't even prevent them from doing other work. The difference is that they're nowhere near as replacable. Fox can (and did) replace most of the original writers of the show to the extent that the plots and quality have changed hugely (imho), but it still makes money because the show's primary pulling point these days is the voice acting.
The reason they get this much isn't because they're arrogant, it's because that's what the studio thinks they're worth. The actors have been doing voices on this show for something on the order of 20 years! Nearly anyone would rather be spending their time doing something else by that time, and it's not as if the actors owe it to the show's fans to keep working at low rates for the rest of their lives. They've named a price that'll convince them to stay, and Fox thinks they're worth it. At some point it won't be worth it for Fox to keep paying the amount that the actors want, the show will end or they'll find someone else, and the actors will still be happy because they'll finally have time to spend on other projects they've wanted to to for ages. Meanwhile it's market-decided compensation for whatever else they're giving up which they'd much rather be doing.
If this GTA4 guy (whom I never heard of) reckons he's worth more than $100k then more power to him, but he needs to convince someone to pay him what he thinks he's worth. If a studio pays him more they'll probably be subsidising it by dropping alternative actors or talent somewhere else, which he'd be expected to replace. If he can't convince them to do that, he's worth less.