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Businesses Entertainment Games

SAG Approves Gaming Contract 20

Posted by Zonk from the took-them-long-enough dept.
GameDailyBiz reports that the Screen Actor's Guild has finally reached an agreement with the gaming industry over the work of voice actors. From the article: "The new 3.5-year contract gives actors a 36 percent increase in minimum pay, more contributions to benefit plans and other amenities. It does not, however, give voice actors for video games any residuals based on sales of titles, which was the bone of contention between the two unions and the video game companies--the actors felt they should be entitled to residuals on games that sell in excess of 400,000 copies."
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SAG Approves Gaming Contract More

SAG Approves Gaming Contract

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  • Shut Up and Talk (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) *
    I don't see what the big deal is. This is exactly like how painters get a cut of the profits when someone sells a house that the painter was previously contracted to paint.

    Oh wait - that's right, that doesn't happen anywhere but Hollywood. Get a real job and quit crying you little voice-acting pussies. Really, I don't care if a completely unknown person does the voice acting. It's actually preferred and they'll probably do a more believable job.

  • residuals my ass ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by styxlord ( 9897 ) on Friday July 29, 2005 @06:34PM (#13198932)
    It's not like voice talent sells games, its currently a novelty at best to have SAG actors doing voices in games. The only games that go to trouble to point it out are usually doing to distract us (cough * EQ2 * cough).

    The only thing that developments like this are going to acomplish is a reduction in the use of SAG "talent" in games.
    • I don't know about that, the last 2 GTA games had many varied, well known voice talents...

      It's true that SOME games have done this because they otherwise sucked, but on the whole, games that do it are doing it to add value and drama (sports games do this too, only with sports figures)...however, you can still add drama to a storyline with any decent stage actor...

      It's also the same reason popular songs are put into video game soundtracks...the actors are betting that if you like their character in the game
      • Who bought GTA because of the voice acting?

        Who bought GTA because of the particular actors doing the voice acting?

        Who can really even recall who the people were?

        Who would have cared if they had replaced $100k/day hollywood actors doing voice actors with $2,000/day reasonable lesser known talent?

    • Not necessarily- it's a novelty to have big name celebrities do voices in games, but many more games need voice work than before, and game developers are starting to realize that voices, like all audio, are difficult to do really well, and that doing them half-assed will result in a weak spot in the finished project.
  • Most people have a finite amount of money to spend on "entertainment"...movies, video rentals, DVDs, music (CDs/iTunes/etc), video games...

    The SAG has a hand in Theatrical Movies, video rentals, and DVDs as well. As video games take off (this is partly to blame on the economy...video games, magazines, books, etc all have better sales when the economy sucks because it's cheap/reusable entertainment) the SAG is starting to see their other forms of income shrink...

    The problem is, and I don't know if they unde
  • I was really hoping we wouldn't have to keep SAG voice actors in games. If they weren't in games, less people would buy shitty franchise games (and less would be made), games would be cheaper to produce, and we we'll be guarenteed never to have to suffer through a J-Lo game...
  • Shut your whiney pie-hole. Developers, who are *undoubtedly* more responsible for the success or failure of a title than someone who comes in and says "Zug zug" are ahead of you in line.

    Had game publishers agreed to residuals for voice actors, I'm pretty sure all holy hell would break lose. (Or at the least, you would've seen a mass exodus of developers).

    I sure as hell wouldn't stick around in the industry while some prima-donna comes in, gets paid $150+ an hour, and then walks away with residuals for what
  • So much bitching from so few people who get paid so much to do no work! Quit complaining and get a real job!
  • If I were in the games dev business (hey, what do you know, I am!), this would hopefully lessen my reliance on "storytelling" aspects of design and allow me to focus on "gameplay".

    -gary
  • Sounds like Hollywood has been massively overinflating the worth of its actors again. Who cares if a game has a big name actor in it? It makes no difference to me who did the voice so long as it's appropriate to the character. The amount of effort contributed by a celeb compared to the effort a coder puts in just shows how overpaid these actors really are. I mean you're just paying someone to sit on their arse and read from a script in an air conditioned studio for an afternoon. Hardly taxing is it?

    In fact
    • Michael Ironside? In a game?

      What game, what game?!

      That said, when it comes to voice acting, I still have to give the cup to Michael Bell and Simon Templeman ("Raziel" and "Kain", respectively).

      Normally, I agree with voice-acting being a "quirk" but LoK/SR wouldn't have been the same without it. Come on now. Who's played the games and doesn't automatically think of the 415 times you hear Raziel/Michael Bell refer to Kain as "A/That Bastard."
  • This could be a Two Edge Sword. If the games are AWSOME Like GTA: San Andreas then the voice actors will get good reps with game players. But if the game Sucks it could hurt the actor in the process not to mention the game company. This might make a demand for more High Quality games instead of trash games.
  • Just because a voice actor (or any actor, for that matter) is a member of SAG doesn't mean that he or she is "well-known." There are hundreds of thousands of SAG members in America, and I'd be willing to bet you don't know all their names on sight. SAG is a union, just like the Teamsters or any other workman's organization that works in the best interest of its members. It makes sure that actors get paid enough to support themselves (often in jobs that are paid by the day rather than the hour, where "day" c

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