Good.
One of my good friends was one of the voices on LA Noire years ago and gets zero residuals from it. It’s maddening.
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just give everyone residuals
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I will just say I think everyone involved in a project should be paid a fraction of the proceeds roughly in proportion to the work and sweat they contribute
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Voice actors are among “those who actually make the games.” Voice acting in particular also is strenuous work that can and does cause physical injury when workers are compelled to work long hours doing rough voices and so on. People end up having to have surgery on their vocal cords.
We don’t need to devalue voice actors to value other game industry workers. The only difference is the voice actors organized first, probably because of the injury risk, and when you form a union you have to define a group that you can reach and coordinate. It shouldn’t be an us vs them among works.
Don’t forget mocap. A lot of actors are doing mocap for games now, which also potentially results in injury.
This also includes stunt workers (who do the more intensive motion capture work) and stunt coordinators, many of whom are in the Screen Actors Guild already.
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There are different unions for different trades. Stop trying to sound so smart, you keep failing.
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Oh, great, trade unions. That never caused any issues for worker’s unity. If you can’t organise everyone, from tech lead to cleaning staff, in the same industrial union you’re playing right into the capitalists’ divide and conquer game.
Not so. It makes sense to organise in trade unions. The heads of those unions are on the same side most of the time, as it would be in this case, and they can easily coordinate their actions. But in some cases the interests of one trade have no bearing on another, or are even in opposition, in which case it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to organise a balloted action across the entire union. Thus nullifying the strength of the union and playing right into the capitalist’s hands.
So instead of coming to terms with your fellow workers you rather have them fight capitalists by themselves? Leave them to the scraps the bosses deem sufficient while you’re wheeling away a wagonload of concessions won through your unique bargaining power?
You’re limiting the strength of worker’s. If train conductors don’t strike for train toilet cleaners noone will.
And any opposition between worker’s interests is negligible compared to that between workers and capital, who have no interests in common at all.
You’ve misread my comment I think. Unions can coordinate and organise together. So nobody would be leaving their fellow worker to fight by themselves.
They need to unionize too. Also count actors are included in the “actually make the games” group. Everyone should be paid well, don’t drag a group trying to fix that down because the rest aren’t doing anything.
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Voice actors have a union.
Designers and engineers generally don’t. Yet.
for those in america, CWA, Communication Workers of America, is a union that’s trying to reach out to the developers in the game industry
A better deal for one group helps the rest of them by setting precedent.
Or ensures the others get locked out, as the business feels the financial sting of the first effort
I’m reminded that those who actually make the games don’t get that. They have overtime without pay.
Yes, capitalism fucks everyone every day unless you fight for what you deserve, usually for decades, and even then only getting half of it. It’s surprising that keeping this in mind requires reminders.
Well maybe every one should be getting a Lil slice? Ehh
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I think they asked for that in the last strike, but I haven’t seen it mentioned in this one. And some speculated it was only included for something they could drop in the eventual resolution as a form of compromise.
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That’s not this strike though.
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You say VAs plural but then gave a singular example
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but since this strike is against certain companies and not some entity that represents the entire industry like it does for movies and television, that means that other individual companies who come to an agreement can still hire these people, right? If so…imagine if we had that in movies and television.
We do. A24, for instance, is still making a couple movies by agreeing to work under the proposed terms by SAG. As far as I know, no one else has made such agreements yet. The more of such exceptions that get made, the weaker the AMPTP’s position will get.
Dropout.tv(formerly CollegeHumour) is also an unstruck company.One more reason to love dropout!
Because they have a different contract for work not covered by the current strike? That seems kind of a weird take, especially since they thought the strike did apply to them originally and they shut down for several weeks until the lawyers got together and said, oh no, you have a different type of agreement.
It’s not like they changed or updated their contract to become exempt. SAG just went, oh, your business doesn’t fall into the terms of the strike so you don’t have to strike with the rest of us.
I didn’t know that! I just subbed to their service for Make Some Noise so I kind of feel better about shelling out for it now.
Oh, I see. I thought all of Hollywood was AMPTP and that’s why we can’t have nice things like DRM-free movie purchases.
I never wondered about the conditions of videogames workers, but I’m really happy that they get better thanks to this movement !
It’s 10x worse than whatever you’re imagining.
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No guarantee anything gets better yet.
And there’s no reason to think it will
Oh I can provide context with an entertaining and informative video!
https://youtu.be/DN-Hv3pnVz0?si=y11gki97RBZ5paQa
Shout out to Matt McMuscles who makes these. What a champ.
Thanks for sharing ! Looks like the usual “small white male feeling powerful because he’s the boss” bullshit more than a problem specific to the gaming industry.
Anyway, unionizing should protect them better from these kind of abuse, which is good :)
Either everyone needs to get royalties or nobody does.
Pay your voice actors right the first time instead of paying them shit per line. Or if your video game becomes an astounding success, all 1,000 people get a slice of that 100,000,000 million it made in sales via residuals. A cool $100,000 for everyone!
Don’t forget to advocate for yourself even if you have a union. Nobody ever gets paid more by saying nothing.
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The coders have their copyrighted works replicated infinitely without royalties as well.
What makes a voice actor’s contributions more meaningful than that? Especially since they can get a half decent voice performance out of any coder and the right generative software which already exists.
Yeah perpetual royalties are a nonsense slippery slope. People are pushing for it in all the wrong ways wanting a piece of the pie from the higher ups when in reality the way the money flows just needs to be altered.
Bridge and road crews don’t get to get a penny every time someone drives over stuff.
Creation does not mean benefit in perpetuity. It means you created something. You should be paid properly for it, yes, but it doesn’t mean every time someone mentions your book you get a penny from them lol.
Melancholy Elephants was a great Hugo Award short story about this very thing written in 1983. It’s a great read for those who want to go in a bit blind. http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
How the hell do you spoiler tag on Kbin? lol
I think that the main problem is that companies keep getting revenue even if actors don’t. Book writers don’t stop earning money just because they wrote their book 5 years ago, and yes, they don’t win money for reselling, but companies like Amazon and their editorials will keep earning money because of their work, so why shouldn’t the writers earn money?
If your work isnt being streamed or sold, well, you won’t see much. But still, you signed a contract, like the old perpetual pensions.
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or nobody does
Be careful, Disney might like that idea
Great. Their CEO can make $2,000,000 / year and the rest $100,000 capping their maximum pay at 20x their lowest paid employee.
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How so?
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I wonder how many are actually in union to gain that bargain power?
I know most if not all of the cast of Critical Role (who are voice actors for many video games) are members. Ashley Johnson is the voice of Ellie for TLoU, so if they’re working on TLoU3, they’ll likely have to delay it.
I was hoping this extends to many other departments.
It doesn’t, unfortunately. Programmers, animators, concept artists, designers, each need to unionize in order to leverage collective action grants at the bargaining table. With last week’s decision by the NLRB though, it’s certain to be easier than ever to get unionized. Still, the amount of coordination it gets to even petition the NLRB to have your union recognized is no small feat. Just now it’ll be that much more difficult to bust a union election
Wasn’t there a threat of a game VA strike a few years ago and it turned out that some of the bigger names like Troy Baker aren’t in the Union?0
