LA Times examines SAG voice acting dispute

I want to mate with his voice, and it's probably scientifically possible, despite me being male, because of his awesomeness.

I'm going to underbid you and take the pay for $799.

Sorry, Bubbameister33, but the SAG doesn't look kindly upon that sort of stuff. We're here to protect the wadges of hard working actors! Now you either sign up for the SAG right now and pay your membership dues, or we'll send someone out to 'change your mind' for a few hours.

BWAHAHAAHAHAHA

Now how can we sucker those videogame makers out of more money! Oh I know, actors should be paid for every time their voice samples are played! MUAHAHAHAAHAHAH

- Evil SAG administrator

I'll do it for free!

I don't know how voice actors can afford to eat. You'd make more money working at a McDonalds.

Why....why must I always reply fail.....

@BananaBoat

It's because you're a banana boat.

.....go on

No, you don't. Trust me. I work on a small development team...take my word...you don't want it.

Guess you better stop playing videogames and get off of Joystiq, then.

Also, I found the idiocy of your comment entertaining...so you've sinned.

Burn him!

If the designer, engineer, artist, animator, etc. who works more than full time hours for two years to produce the game do not get a flat rate + a percentage of the sales, then why should voice actors whose work can be measured in hours get a better deal? Most game devs get a salary and MAYBE some kind of variable bonus at the end of the year, which is usually crappy and not at all in line with a percentage of the game sales. This is why game devs think actors asking for residuals on games is laughable.

Where SAG has a good argument is in defining principal vs supporting characters and minimum compensation based on how stressful the recording session is (lots and lots of yelling and screaming in games is very stressful on an actor's voice and deserves more compensation).

I bet you voiced the yellow puzzle piece, didn't you?

...most of the time the game developers don't get bonuses.

This could potentially just force less voice work in games. The more you have to pay out for voice talent, the less money you have for development. If you don't have a lot of money, it's easy to cut "polish" items like voice over first.

It's ignorant to suggest that voice actors receiving residuals would "bleed into development." The whole point of residuals is that more plays of a particular item, that is more SALES, equals more money for the associated talent. If a game fails to sell, there are essentially NO residuals, making the point entirely moot.

The contract isn't only about residuals though, it's also about paying them extra bonus cash for doing a lot of work, getting paid on a "per character" basis instead of just based on time, etc...

Like the term mentioned in the article, to where they want to get paid "double" for doing 10 voices in 6 hours or whatever.

I mean, I understand paying the big time voice roles more, you expect higher quality. But I don't think if you do 10 different voice types of damage grunts for an hour, you deserve double the rate I paid you for an hour of story critical dialogue.

Doing 10 different voices and making them all sound distinct is a talent though, a talent that deserves extra pay. Very few VAs can do it convincingly, and those people are gods. Billy West is one of them, also Frank Welker(the modern day Mel Blanc) and a few others. You don't pay those kinds of talents the same thing you'll pay a random guy who comes in to voice 1 character.

Very often now the mo-cap is done by the vo actors. Game studios are realizing that they need better performances top to bottom, and are relying on more and more on actors. Just trying to find ways to pay them less and less of course...

Yeah because corporations totally wouldn't screw their workers over if they weren't unionized in our advanced digital society.



/s

You don't like your employer get another job.

Good point, the mortgage payment, car payment, utility payment, and other payments will wait until you can find another job.

I've worked for a handful of large corporations in my life and never been part of a union, and I survived just fine.

Exactly. SAG is essentially trying to get the profession of voice actor to the point where someone could actually make a living doing it. There is a long way to go, and even with the low wages they earn (big name actors probably bill 800 dollars worth of hookers and blow per every day on the job) there are still companies out there willing to go behind the backs of the actors by hiring non-union workers at a lower wage. Needless to say, there is quite a quality gap between a professional VA at 800 dollars a day, and a scab at maybe half that.

All this tells me is that there are way too many people out there who want to be voice actors. Supply and demand, people, supply and demand.

With unemployment generously listed around 10%? Yeah, there are people that would voice act in exchange for one hot meal a day. The problem with that is the obvious gap in quality between a trained actor and someone that can provide little more than a line reading.

It's possible that the buying public can't tell the difference and doesn't care too much. It's also good to point out that, unlike a major name like hiring Tom Hanks to do Woody in Toy Story, slapping David Hayter's name on the front of a game isn't going to generate any more sales than if it was any other guy. The voice acting clearly isn't the focal point of a video game. Look at the sales of Final Fantasy X for instance, voice acting was terrible yet it still sold phenomenally well. Voice acting in video games is clearly not something that the consumer cares too much about. If it were a selling point, then games with better voice overs but inferior gameplay would win in the marketplace.

Voice actors are a dime a dozen. The Team Four Star guys are excellent voice actors and they do it for absolutely nothing.

Here's the question you have to ask yourself. Are you willing to pay a $10 or $20 extra premium or trade quality programming for higher paid voice actors? Wages are nothing more than a numerical intermediary of the trade process to avoid problems of multi-lateral trade (voice actor wants groceries from the store, but the store doesn't want to buy voice overs, so money is an intermediary), so demanding a higher number isn't simple. Either you have to give up more of what you produce or accept lower quality in other parts of the production.

The concept of a living wage is nothing but fantasy. If the chosen profession can't put food on the table, pick a new profession. Demanding video game voice actors to be paid more is like me demanding to be paid to deliver ice door to door. I could determine that no one wants daily ice deliveries because modern refrigerators create the stuff almost for nothing and find something else to do. Or, I could form a union and use the force of government through various laws to make General Electric and Whirlpool remove ice makers from their refrigerators, block convenience stores from selling those 5 pound bags for $1 so I can artificially inflate my own personal salary and force anyone interested in ice to buy from my otherwise inefficient and unwanted services. This is how the SGA operates, they use laws like the Norris-Laguardia Act to force movie studios to enter into agreements with them which basically say that no movie studio that effectively has major distribution channels can hire anyone that isn't a member of the SGA and you can't be an SGA unless you've acted in a major motion picture (see the circular logic here?). The SGA isn't doing this for the benefit of a bunch of abused voice actors, they're doing this to artificially inflate wages and block newcomers from entering the market.

This comes back to my main point. If video game voice actors were actually worth your arbitrarily determined "living wage" they would be paid it. The SGA is completely unnecessary. There is just way too much competition among video game publishers and developers to claim that there's some major cabal or conspiracy holding wages down. They're simply not worth more than what they're being paid now.

Without unions, we'd have a lower class and an upper class, with nothing in between. That isn't an opinion, that is a fact based on the aforementioned reality of a market without the collective bargaining and job security provided by organized unions. Putting that aside however (that's a debate neither of us have any say in anyway, since neither of us are in congress), for video games to truly advance in terms of their respectability (or in terms of being considered "art"), developers will have to start paying more attention to the voice acting (and mo-cap acting, etc) involved with the production of a video game. Obviously every game doesn't need top tier voice acting, but it's shameful when a studio creating a multi-million dollar blockbuster game hires people that either A: have no interest in games, B: no acting ability, or both, as if it doesn't matter. Anyone with half a brain will recognize when someone without any acting ability is simply reading lines off of a page, without actually doing any acting. That isn't to say that all SAG members excel at their craft, but they are surely a lot better than your average untrained and inexperienced person.

The problem isn't just video games though. There are anime production companies doing the same thing to voice actors. I'd imagine that the same goes for commercial production companies, and probably any other industry that involves voice over work. Instead of paying a professional, they'd gladly pay an amateur less. Instead of being able to make a living at voice acting, the professional voice actors have to take second jobs. I'm not saying that there would be enough work to go around if all the big dev studios were required to use union labor, but I'm sure the voice actors could make more than Dave Wittenburg's 30k a year.


(The preceding is obviously based on my unshakable belief that it is the obligation of corporations to pay their workers enough money for them to live a middle class life in this country)

@BananaBoat: I agree that unions have played a very important role, and the concept behind unions is a good one, but right now it seems like they're able to cause just as many problems as they cure.

I live in the Detroit area and here the UAW is a good example - once upon a time it was a good thing, now that's definitely arguable. When automotive companies are collapsing and unions are still demanding more and more it creates a problem instead of solving one.

I work for a company that works heavily for the newspaper industry, and that's another perfect example. The unions in the newspaper industry once served an important role, but in the end they were a part of the impending collapse of the industry.

There are actors all over the world who do voices for games, not just in Hollywood. Regardless, you get some bumb off the street, that's the quality you're going to get for your voice acting in the game. Lack of experience in the performer will lead to longer development time, more studio time, a complete waste of time for the developers.

Do you even realize how much it costs to cast a game in the first place? Hiring a casting director, finding talent. Who do you suppose finds talent in the first place, much less "unknown" talent? Where are they?

Most of the voiceover actors in video games are already *unknown*. Most of the jobs are non-union already.

You're right, a lot of people "would" do it for free. But I guarantee you, not many of them CAN do it, period. And NO studio would "let them do it for free", either - all the studios have to pay THEIR employees, facilities fees, etc.

An inexperienced talent will take more time to record the same material than an experienced talent will take, thus cutting development costs.

You people seem to think voice actors are a dime a dozen, easily replaced. HARDLY the truth. Just go to videovoicebank.net and listen to all the many, many demos of voice talent - few great, some good, some bad, some VERY bad. And that just because game programmers put in extra hours of overtime for game development that voice actors shouldn't be compensated for their work, and for the continued life of their work as it continues to sell, and be re-released, and so on and so forth.

How is it relevant to voice actors whether or not programmers get paid or not paid for overtime? Shouldn't they BOTH get paid for their work?

As someone who works with and directs voice talent on a consistent basis, I will say this: there is a huge, HUGE, difference in dealing with someone who is an experienced voice-over artist and someone who is not. They know how to give a good read for a script, they know what words to accentuate and they are usually able to get in character much quicker than the average person off the street. It seriously cuts down on the amount of time and frustration for a recording session. That alone should be worth at least a little more money.

they want to get paid on a per voice basis which is ridiculous, do modellers get paid on a per model basis? programmers on a per line basis? why should voice actors who already get a signifcant amount of money for their time start being paid more because there are more voices needed?

Considering how many video games are actually made, and how infrequently one might be fortunate enough to land a voice over gig for a video game, $800 for 4 hours is chickenfeed.

You talk like $200/hr. is a lot of money. Sounds like it, right? But that's only true if you amass a lot of working sessions. In general, you're called in to a voice session *1* time on a game. That's it. And it's extremely unusual for someone to work on multiple games in a given year.

So, let's say you work on 4 games in a given year. That's a VERY good year for a voice actor. Most are unknown talent and don't even book ONE video game, so if they get a voice acting gig on a game, they don't command anything more than that $800.

Thus, an entire year of one's career in voice acting for video games will, if lucky, net only $3,200.

That's less than $100 a week.

Doesn't sound like so much anymore, does it?

I can't fault you that $200/hr doesn't amount to much when one works such limited hours, but what job does pay out huge when you only work such limited hours?

Its like any job you need to do lots of work to make money and a single 30min-1hr session doesn't cut it, it also doesn't cut it if your a programmer, Customer service Rep, head chef, Amtrak Worker or any other job I can think of.

Even Anime voice actors typically have other jobs be that several other anime or what have you, because even a lead or recurring roll on one anime doesn't pay the bills. What it boils down to is Voice acting like ANY JOB isn't something that you can rely on as a source of primary income unless you do it a lot, so yeah $3,600 for a smidge over a half days work (16hr) sounds like a lot to me.

Figuring @ $40/hr if one was to work 16 hrs strait that only comes out to $800 figuring for ~4hrs of time and a half and ~2hrs of overtime. Of course you would take out for probably about two hours worth of breaks so it comes down closer to $720...but unless you worked 16 hrs strait your looking more like $640.. Vs $3,600

So to me $200/hr sounds like more than a fair wage. The fact that Voice actors aren't getting like 30 game gigs a year the majority of which are probably 1-2hrs, doesn't seem to me like its the fault of the gaming industry.