f13.net

"The Screen Actors Guild rejected a contract proposal that would have given performers who provide the voices of video game characters a 36 percent raise over three years, according to a published report."

"Some SAG members argued the union should hold out until makers of video games agreed to share their profits and also acknowledged the contribution of stars, who are increasingly tapped for games. One of the key demands from actors had been to receive extra money when a game sells more than 400,000 units, but representatives of the $25 billion game industry refused to budge.

Actors currently are paid a minimum of $556 per four-hour session. The 3 1/2 -year agreement that was scrapped by SAG on Tuesday would have increased the rate to $759 by 2008, with an immediate 25 percent increase to $695."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8317834/

Personally, I could care less if Samuel Jackson does the voice over. Is it that important? As long as the voice talent sounds good I'd rather have the money spent on other features.

SAG or AFTRA doesn't necessarily entail celebrities or Sam Jackson. It entails just about every actor who's had a decent speaking role in 90% of the films, tv shows, and commericials out there.

Whatever "good" talent that's available is most likely going to be unionized.....And if you do so happen to find the right people for the job that aren't guilded --- Then they're eventually going to be anyways, especially once they start getting steady work.

Whether the voices are those of celebrities or not doesn't matter to me.  Unless it's James Earl Jones or Eric Idle, I never recognise them anyway.

Given the "production values" going into most every game and the SAG contracts (which I've had to sign to get work done) I think you'll see overseas voice talent being used in place of SAG members and their annoying contracts.

I can't wait for some more "engrish" VO's to start hitting the games. I've already played a few Japanese titles with accented voices and found them to be quite decent.

It could certainly work in some cases, but I think sooner or later they're going to have to come in agreement on something. Ignoring the problem isn't going to help. Game companies need to change their ways a bit. As I said on the "other" site about this: It's not a technological industry so much as it is an entertainment industry....And there are certain rules one is going to have to play by the more that becomes apparent.

You know who I'm going to blame the problems on, don't you? The people who are really making the money in the game industry, the publishers. The developers don't make shit. Most of that $25 billion dollars isn't going to the developers, that's for goddamn sure.

The douchebags in charge of the money in gaming don't want to let any of it go.

Far as I'm concerned game publishers don't need to play SAG's little reindeer games.  The trend to overly adverti-commercialize games already pisses me off.  To me it's more immersion-breaking when I twinge to a well-known name.  Earl Jones doing a CNN VO gets my attention for the right reason.

No celebrity voiceovers and more mentally stimulating content for me please.

I'd prefer games have more content depth/interesting concepts and less "glitz".  I'm really tiring of the flashy graphics with superficial gameplay.

I see this as a gain for anime dub actors.

No, seriously.

Typically they have both SAG and non-SAG identities. They have to work both sides because of the scarcity of work. Unlike those in Hollywood, dub actors have to keep their day jobs. There are pools of experienced voice actors willing to flip SAG the bird in both CA and TX.

Celebrities are generally a distraction in video games.  Immersion breaking.

However, professionals do a better job, on average, in my experience.  This is true of voice work as it is of anything.

So I think games could benefit from the use of skilled professionals.  And I think industry workers in general could benefit from SAG-like comtract terms.  But until programmers and designers are getting similar terms, I doubt that voice actors are going to get much traction.

Which means that at least one part of video games will continue to suck.

I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you.

QA?

Fun?

I dont give a shit about voice actin in a game, unless its used all the time (like in WoW).  In that case, you need to have it done well or it will eventually just become nails down a chalkboard for your players.  If its just a couple cutscenes, fuck SAG and get some homeless people to do it, i'd rather see the bread go into making the game not suck.

I also dont think voice actors are particularly entitled to %-of-sales based anything.  Nobody buys a game cause they heard so-and-so is voiice actin in it.  All the good voice acting does is make itself not obnoxious.  I can think of VERY few games where i actually found it to be an enhancment (Baldur's Gate 1&2, Fallout 2).

Anime is a different beast, and those actors can get paid, because thier success or failure is a huge part of what makes the movie good or suck.

The people who did the voicework in Colorful are amazing. That said, the Japanese dub of Howl (the new Ghibli movie) has Takuya Kimura playing the lead.

No one in America can beat that.

In other words: I agree with Stormwaltz. Personally, I hate seeing something and hearing Fox Mulder. Or any other character. Area 51 happened to be what was in my head.

I still don't get what actor's unions has to do with "celebrities" per se. That's misleading. Or did I miss something here?

While there's more than one actor's union, SAG is the important one. It consists of the rich and famous and is the one in the news all the time. "News from the Screen Actor's Guild" blah blah blah blah blah blah. Basically - the rich are being greedy. Which is fine with me, I don't want Final Fantasy XII's lead guy and girl to be...














...Dharma and Greg.

Edit: Wiki Entry for SAG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Actors_Guild).

I know what SAG is, of course (I'm a wannabe actor/professional auditioner, if you recall?  :lol:). And while it contains the bigger name actors out there, it also has like 90,000 members (last I checked). AFTRA is around 70,000. AEA (stage union) is close to 40,000. Half are in at least two of those. There's over 100,000 unionized actors in America alone. Only about 5% are celebrities (counting old fogeys and recognizable has beens). Trying to bypass them is not really the wisest thing to do.

As for the rich wanting to get richer, yeah, I'll agree on that somewhat....When it pertains to the bigger names. What's new though? And besides, like Haemish mentioned, the other side of the court has it's own share of moneygrubbing bastards.

edit: The other thing worth mentioning is that the more you employ non unionized actors with good work, the more impressive of a resume they'll have to be able to qualify for a union (or at least unionized projects...which, in turn, leads them to join a union). All worthy actors eventually join. So no matter what way you look at it, a union's demands aren't really going to go away.

Except for a handful of blockbuster games probably tied to a franchise there really is no pressure on the game industry to hire more expensive union talent.

Screw them. I want decent voice acting by actors who's voices I don't recognise. I want to associate the voice of the character with the character, not the character the actor played on a UPN sitcom.

edit: Screw it.

Thanks for explaining why voiceover artists use multiple names... one per union?  Are there really ten different unions?

I just want the voices to be good.  Some people who may be good on screen are just awful behind a mic.  This does not necessarily imply SAG involvement, but if a job consists of a skill that a large percentage of the population can pull off, you end up with a union to resist market forces.

Axl Rose was awful in San Andreas.

I believe that this statement explains the existance of the vast majority of unions.  You might argue that the SAG is an exception, as acting isn't a skill that a large percentage of the population can pull off... but I'd argue that it's not a skill that a large percentage of SAG members can pull off, either.

Alkiera

Fuck voice actors. Those greedy assholes are part of the reason production costs on games are so high now. They got a raise from $139 an hour to $189 an hour and they are still bitching? Guess what, if you don't like it, don't sign the "work for hire" contract.

For anything longer than say two sentences I can read it faster than they can and the voice just gets in the way.

Hmm..

Umm..

What?!?!

The average recording session isn't even going to take up half a work day. Lol, what are you talking about? That kind of pay isn't shit compared to how much money is being made on most games.

Anywho, an agreement has been met (much of it on these very details, in fact). Thread over (I hope).

No, SAG rejected the June 8th agreement they reached which is what the original post quoted ("contract will come up for reconsideration at a special board meeting next Wednesday"). And I'd just point to the EQ2 voice recordings (150+ hours or whatever?) but that's probably an exception to the average. The SAG sticking point is still that they want residuals for 400k+ units.

This is exactly the reason guilds/unions won't work in the gaming industry. I hope everyone likes this shining example of douchebaggery.

Wait... you're saying acting is a skill requiring more mastery than fabrication, distribution logistics, construction, or all the other sectors unions are most known for?

You're cracked.  Trust me, the average commercial air conditioning guy has mastered far more crap than any freaking actor.

There are a lot of people on this board who rail against The Man but don't seem to have any love for the little guy either.  Collective bargaining is no more foolish than representational deomocracy - in fact both are just forms of the other.

I personally rail against the unions because they quickly, VERY quickly become the big guys, negotiating with the bigger guys, all supposedly on behalf of the Little Guy^TM, while really doing nothing but trying to consolidate their own power base. When you start talking about entertainment industries, like sports or games or movies, every one in the equation very quickly forgets about the fuckers who are actually supporting the industry, i.e. THE FANS, all in a slapfight orgy of grabassines to see who can one-up the other one.

See the NHL collective bargaining agreement for details.

The Unions are not always the good guys. And most times, there ARE no good guys, such as in the aforementioned hockey lockout. And as I said earlier, the real bad guys in the negotiation above aren't the voice actors, they are the publishers who are making killings off of these games (HI, EA!) while squeezing the developers for every rotten tenth of a penny they can.

The original intent of unions was to prevent abuse of labor by management.  That worked pretty well.  We don't see too much of that these days, and unions spend their time trying to get all the benefits they can for the workers.  I don't have a problem with this, but I don't care for greed.  The leverage a union holds is designed to be used against equally-powerful management.  It is, I would say, overkill against an industry of mostly business incompetents like video-games.  EA is an exception to that; they know what they are doing and unionizing is probably the only cure for their antics.

I am not necessarily pro- or anti-union in an absolute sense.  Unions are tools and can be misused like anything else.

As for work that anyone can do, it is true to a degree.  Anyone can be a carpenter or an actor, there is no special barrier to entry.  If you are an average person you can make the union minimum in these fields.  Note that I am not saying an untrained person can be a carpenter or actor, I'm just saying that there are a whole lot of people who are pretty sure they can pull off swinging a hammer or being a jackass in front of other people.  You end up with a lot more people willing to do the job than there are jobs, and unions counter the market forces that drive down price due to lack of demand.

I didn't think Axl was all that bad, but my opinion (and most people's) was likely jaded by the fact that we knew it was Axl. On the other hand, to reinforce my earlier point of not wanting name actors doing voices -  I have no idea who did the voice of Sage on Radio X, but I thought she was dead on perfect for the game.

Good acting does require some skill, and to a certain extent, requires lots of 'okay' side skills, as to act in an action movie, you may need to learn a martial art, or to 'stunt drive', or any number of other skills you need to be seen on camera performing with some competancy.  Acting is a skill that can be learned, all you really need is the desire to learn and practice.

The same is true of the AC repair guy, or tool and die work, truck drivers, construction workers, etc.  Anyone who puts their mind to it can learn those jobs.

Alkiera

I thought the KDST DJ was horrible before I knew it was Axl.  Sage, she was good.  George Clinton was better than Axl, who sounded like he was reading the script for the first time through the whole game.  Needed more Laslow.

And more Fernando.  WHERE IS FERNANDO?

For anyone still interested, there was an editorial on gamespot (http://www.gamespot.com/features/freeplay/index.html?q=1&push=0) that hit on this issue.

 Vampires Jack, the radio chick, the guy doin the tv...shit the whole crew. Excellent voice work in my opinion. The only one I really hated listening to was the plagued nosferatu in the sewer, but thankfully you got to shut him up quickly.

No.

That's to answer the question in the topic.  Usually, I don't even have the patience to listen to the voices.  Maybe once.  If they're not too annoying or long.  After that...well, I read way faster than most people, and most people if they care to put half a thought into it read faster than the voice actor.  If the voice acting is good, I'll listen to it once.  Maybe a few times if it's really good.  There are very few people who's voices I would consider 'awesome' enough to actually *matter.*  James Earl Jones as mentoned earlier would count.  But all things considered, you could slap a celebrity list as big as Mars Attacks' cast on a game box, and slap 'Absolutely no voice acting whatsoever!' on the box, and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to me one way or another.  By the time the rest of the game immersion gets to the point of whether or not I care whether I can listen to the speech or not, you probably won't even need voice actors; computers will be synthesizing the voices perfectly by then.

As for the union...  Same as most all unions now a days.  Pure greed.  They're already getting paid a lot, and for a job that's not crucial to the success of the game.  Unions for the most part are as outdated as full plate armor.  We have laws to enact the basic protections unions were formed to combat now.  Organizations spanning multiple companies are ludicrous.  If one company is treating its employees unfairly, it is logical for them to band together, but no 'entire industry' treats its employees unfairly.  Organizing all actors together just swings things too far in the other direction, giving the union way too much unfair power over the employers, while not even being that beneificial for the individual people in the union.  Same applies to any industry with a union (with possible exceptions I'm not personally aware of).

Most voice actors in games do seem low compared to in cartoons say.

I think your attitude is true of most people. Distinctive sounds in games get repetitive and annoying quickly. It's one reason the music in games rarely have vocals, repetitive vocals get annoying fast.

Personally I could care less about voice acting, you hear it once, it sucks, then you try to find the option to turn it off. Although I will say the voice acting in GTA wasn't bad and did sort of add to the game I guess. (I don't like GTA but the voice acting in Vice City seemed ok)

Having every NPC voice stuff seems insane to me. It's one thing to have voices in the cutscenes. I don't really see the need for an NPC to say "Please protect from the evil trolls" in a real voice.
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Off on a tangent a bit, it would be great to read a post-mortem on EQ2 sometime. It seems like the entire production side of the game (asset production - sound, graphics, etc) was terrible and it wasn't just executed terribly but was horribly conceived. I wonder how the heck that happened? You figure EQ2 of all things could afford to get some proven experts with great track-records. Although I do know that the guy who did a lot of the enemy modelling left to do Vanguard. (Milo Cooper, who was an arrogant prick but good at his job)

Short of the character design - as in the overarching theme of art in the game - I thought the production value was the strongest point of EQ2. Everything was of the highest quality I've seen in an MMOG, it just happened to be ugly. The lead artist or whoever said "this looks good" should be fired and blacklisted by the industry for blowing that much money on high quality bad art. Unfortunately, the game had no style and was one-upped completely by a Korean studio when they started localizing the game over there. Really, it's biggest fault was simply being EQ2. There were a number of tracks on the soundtrack that I enjoyed immensely as well as a wealth of great voice acting. Given that it's really the only voice acting that's been in an MMOG, I think they did a fine job of pioneering the field.

I'd rather see a post-mortem on why the hell the designers in the EQ2 beta forums only listened to the "yes"-men and ignored the people burnt by the repetitive gameplay. Or how anyone on the development team ever found the game fun during internal testing. That should be a goddamn requirement. If there's even a single person on a dev team that doesn't think the game they're making is fun, depending on their position, they WILL bring down the final quality of the game a couple notches. Bonus points if it's purposeful sabotage because they can't believe a game that bad is being made.

That said, voice acting Good. Famous people voice acting bad (I don't like the english dubbed versions of Miyazaki's films for that very reason). Though, I'll admit, Howl's Moving Castle - Ghibli Studio's latest movie - has me torn. I love me some Takuya Kimura, but Christian Bale is doing the American voice. Kimura's delivery, which I'm pretty sure 99.9999% of the people here and 99.9999999repeating% people in America have never heard, is nearly perfect. Bale, unfortunately, recently played Batman. I don't think I'll be able to get past that.

While the acting, and the actual technical processes of EQ2's sound design was excellent, I have to say the voiceovers for all the questing and NPC's was easily one of the most irritating aspects of the game for me. Because after about 7 levels, I just started reading the text and not listening to the voice. It took too much time, when what I wanted to do was play. Everytime I heard it, I just lamented at all the money they must have spent on voice acting that could have gone into designing a decent game that was fun to play.

I consider something that has high production value but is ugly to be poorly produced. That's what I mean by the production side of the game being screwed.

Well, I think it depends on what you mean by "important".  Important to the overall quality of the game, not really much, I think.  Important to the financial success of the game, I think you could argue that they do.  Games based off other properties (Movies, TV shows, etc.) especially, I think, get a fair amount of credibility from having the same guy play Gandalf or Obi-Wan or whatever.  And I don't think I've seen a single review of "Destroy all Humans" that fails to mention that the voice actor from Invader Zim is in there.  Obviously, it's not a make-or-break kind of thing, like "should the game have good graphics, yes/no" , but it probably does factor in to some people's purchasing decisions.

Good voice acting can enhance the quality of the game, bad acting can ruin it. Aim for not sucking and anything better is just gravy.

Voice acting can make or brake a game.  A game's story is what makes me want to continue playing it.  I've completed games with sub-par controls just because I was interested in the story (Jade Empire - I'm looking your way) but I've never finished a game once I thought the story sucked.  The story is certainly seperate from the voice acting, but bad voice acting can completely distract from the story (Armies of Exigo aka WC2 - some of the worst voice acting I've heard)  I suppose the expectation is that celebreties would = good voice acting, which for the most part may be true.  But, I think that sometimes celebretie voices can be distracting.  The Final Fantasy movie is an example of this.  Every time the Baldwin guy had a line, I couldn't see it as the charater talking, I could only imagine whathisnuts Baldwin talking.  He's a celebrity, but I don't think he really lent much depth to the character.  In the Usual Suspects, he's ok.  In Final Fantasy, he's shite.  Now there are some great celebrity voice overs - Ray Liota in Vice City is an example of this.  Celebrity voices may be a boost to the marketing value of a game, but celebrity or not, if it ain't good, it ain't good.