I can't speak for Voice Acting booths, but as an animator some of the mo-cap stuff I've seen over the year must break many safety laws.
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WP: In $25 billion video game industry, voice actors face broken vocal cords and low pay
- Thread starter Lime
- Start date
Wish this would actually happen, but the greed is so strong. As I am not living in Holland I can't contribute much in case of voting. =/
I wouldn't trust the US government to actually be fair and everything anyway.
But as you mentioned, this will repeat until the greed dies down or we reach a society where tax havens aren't a thing anymore. Before that they will simply move around to make more money each year and shuffle it to the top.
The conditions should improve, but demanding royalities was such a boneheaded move, especially considering how insistent they were on it. It was never going to happen and pretending voice actors are anywhere near as important in videogame insustry as actors in TV industry are is laughable. Royalities should have been used as sacrificial lamb to drop to get bigger boosts in safety and other areas, not something you extend the strike to a year over.
Reading this article has made me appreciate voice actors even more than ever. The struggle is real and I hope that in the future, their conditions improve or else we will lose such an important aspect of gaming, in my honest opinion.
Games like The Last of Us, Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, Mass Effect, and God of War all relied on exceptional voice acting to elevate their games to new heights.
Games like The Last of Us, Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, Mass Effect, and God of War all relied on exceptional voice acting to elevate their games to new heights.
I absolutely agree with this.
On the other hand, I do think that a comparison between voicework for videos games and actors doing TV work and commercials is somewhat disingenuous. In TV and Film, a huge huge part of what goes into producing the content is provided by the actors/actresses and their talent. In Videogames, voicework is really only a relatively small part of the production of a game. Videogame voicework would probably be more analogous to CGI movie and cartoon voicework, but even then there is a considerable amount more work not done by these voice actors that goes into games.
There definitiely needs to be a marked improvment in wages and working conditions for voice actors in games though.
I completely agree with you regarding the comparison that is usually made between video game voice actors and performance actors on television and in film. Even though the line between those two mediums is getting more blurry with each consecutive generation of games, I'd still agree that a crucial factor of quality in television and films is how well the actors perform. The difference becomes more apparent once you witness a great performance from an actor or actress (e.g. Daniel Day Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood).
With games, that crucial factor may or may not affect the quality of the game. I believe the best example to use here is Silent Hill 2. While the voice work in that game is far from being mediocre, I would still say it didn't add much to the game in terms of enhancing the overall quality of the game. Silent Hill 2, in my opinion, is a masterpiece in this medium and the reasons why its considered to be a masterpiece by critics and gamers will not be because of the voice acting.
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