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Possible Strike Within the Game Industry?
by Alec Matias, Apr 14, 2005 12:59pm PDTWhile we all know there is no union for the gaming industry, developers and publishers do often hire talent that are members of the SAG or AFTRA unions, which protect artists in the film, television, an radio businesses. For a while now, SAG has met with top videogame publishers and worked out bare-bones deals to protect their members, but the current contract is set to expire Friday with no new deal in place. Variety.com suggests we could be just a day away from a videogame-related strike.
A strike would most affect the industry with regard to the use of big names. From Clint Eastwood to Vin Diesel to Heather Graham and even Marlon Brando in EA's "Godfather" adaptation, A-list talent is turning from a rarity to a must-have in the vidgame world. SAG is increasingly hungry for residuals to be part of a mix, because when a game hits, it can hit big -- bigger than the heftiest studio blockbuster, in some cases.This has been a difficult process for all parties since SAG has no official authority to work with and many members of the industry don't know or don't care about the issue. Most companies are content with using non-union workers for their games. Also, when it comes to turning a franchise into a film, some companies don't use union workers until absolutely necessary. For instance, Microsoft has been working on the Halo movie without going through any film studio.
Comments
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It was nice to see in Tron 2.0, maybe, and it's always amusing to see Bruce Campbell get bits of work in games, but past that? Obviously it's a bit of a given for movie tie-ins, but still..
Are you suggesting that the voice actors' contribution to the games I play is big enough that they deserve a royalty share of games' earnings, when the developers don't get such a thing? Or are you just countering the anti-voice actor sentiment expressed in this thread?
But yeah, this is gonna fuck over games in production I guess, either financially or in terms of schedule. To be honest though, that just makes me view the voice actors as greedy assholes.
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I would fully support a strike at EA.
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I saw this on the main page and have to comment quickly. SAG does have official authority. I know, I worked there and my wife currently works there and the actor's certainly do care. Whomever wrote this is either a complete idiot or they didn't do their homework well enough.
To provide a point to this, SAG was in a lawsuit with a major video game company whom I worked for, even though I'm no longer with the company, I can say with 100% accuracy that it was because the actor's were not getting money stipulated within their contract.
Just because a company works on a movie without going through a movie studio doesn't mean that they don't have to pay SAG wages and benefits.
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good! maybe it won't turn out to be the shallow, derivative crap that Hollywood turns out when using a vid game IP.
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It's not just A-list talent, pretty much all voice actors used for games are SAG members. There are also rules that you have to have either all SAG talent, or none at all - so for developers in production, they either have to scrap all their VO and find talent outside SAG, or hold on and hope this gets resolved shortly.
Here's an experiment - look up your favourite game on IMDB, and imagine what it'd be like without those voice actors. Even better, check out the profiles of some of the more well known actors, like Jim Ward and Grant Albrecht.
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The fuck it is. I can't think of anyone who buys a game because fucking Bruce Willis is doing one of the voices or something.
It's kind of like a "Oh yeah, neat" after you find out who did a voice, but really NOC as long as the voice acting is done well.
I don't suspect we'll be sing actors names headlining on videogame boxes anytime soon.
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