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Not sure how well this will work compared to their strike against Hollywood and the film industry. Many video game developers don't work with union actors at al
by CM30 3y ago
Not sure how well this will work compared to their strike against Hollywood and the film industry. Many video game developers don't work with union actors at all, with plenty of games either not having voice acting period or hiring whatever random staff they have around to fill those roles.
For instance, many of Nintendo's games have very little voice acting, or have it done by random internal staff rather than professional actors. So most of the Mario, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Pikmin, Metroid, Animal Crossing, etc series could probably keep on going without any issues. And those franchises that did use voice acting recently (mostly Zelda) could probably just go release a few games in the old style where voices were limited to the odd grunt or yell and it wouldn't make much of a difference. Heck, Pokemon doesn't really have voice acting in its games even now, and that's the biggest media franchise in the world.
Add that to how the industry worked fine up til about the N64/PlayStation era without any voice acting (or at best, very limited acting) and how a large percentage of lower budget and indie games don't have it at all, and it's a lot less important than acting is in the film or television industry. Hollywood actors go on strike and don't appear in films or TV shows? Those industry comes to a screeching halt, since the cast is an essential part of the medium. Actors don't appear in video games? Well, guess the number of silent protagonists goes up significantly this year.
I do wish them the best of luck here and I do understand their concerns, it's just that games need actors a lot less than films do, and that gives them far less leverage as a result.
- watwut 3y agoI think that games that don't use voice actors at all are just not relevant to the issue. Just like banking software is not relevant. There are games that do require it, those are relevant.
- crazygringo 3y agoExactly. This is about games like GTAV and RDR2. These games don't exist without whole casts of talented actors, and they're SAG-AFTRA because every working actor at that level belongs to the union.
- mcpackieh 3y agoMost of the games that 'require' voice acting actually don't, and could work with text. The reason they have voice acting is because mass audiences expect it, but consumer expectations are malleable and subject to change.
- wlesieutre 3y agoSure, and Hollywood could stop recording audio and go back to silent movies because movies don’t ‘require’ sound.
- mcpackieh 3y agoBasically correct, although it wouldn't actually happen unless sound in movies became cost prohibitive (which is what we're discussing.) However in video-games this is even more true. 'Talkies' crushed silent movies, out-competed them very rapidly in the span of a few years. But in video games this didn't happen, video games with voice acting have existed for roughly 30 years now but video games without voice acting still frequently find commercial success. In fact the most successful video game of all time, minecraft, has no voice acting despite competing against innumerable contemporary games with voice acting.
- nirvdrum 3y agoAnd some of the top grossing video games of all time have voice acting. The modern Rockstar and Naughty Dog games would be less attractive and have much less emotional impact without the characters coming to life via voice. Character models help sell games, too. Sure, voice acting isn't required for all genres and many don't need motion capture, but if they didn't add anything studios could save a ton of money by cutting it out. It turns out not everyone wants to play indie platformers or sandboxed builders. You could of course use non-union voice actors, but it's pretty easy to tell when games use random people to narrate or voice characters. It often harms the product.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoMinecraft has no storyline or named characters though. It's not really "competing" against games with voice acting, as they're totally different genres. To me this feels like like saying movies don't need better CGI than Playstation 2 quality because of how's successful Paw Patrol and Baby Shark are.
- rhdunn 3y agoSo what will happen is that the games using SAG-AFTRA voice actors will be delayed/dropped from production, while the games using non-US union voice actors or not needing voices will be produced. Therefore, the SAG-AFTRA games and the associated companies will suffer but the industry will not. The situation is different for films and TV where no US-based TV show or film can be produced without the actors or writers. There are interim agreements that allow some TV shows and films to be produced. Even there, there are a lot of older or foreign TV shows and films that are slowly taking over.
- bombcar 3y agoAt least for me, if they can strike for about twenty years I might be able to get through my Steam backlog.
- the_lonely_road 3y agoOne of the most popular add ins for World of Warcraft released in recent memory is one that adds voice acting to all of the quests that were previously text only. No voice actors were hired as part of its creation. I doubt a return to silent protagonists is what we will see in this space.
- neuromanser 3y ago> Well, guess the number of silent protagonists goes up significantly this year. I don't know what games you were thinking of, but I immediately thought of Half-Life, those games have a silent protagonist and a lot of voice acting.
- philistine 3y agoYou do realize that you just said that Mario games have voices done by random internal staff, right? When everybody and their mothers know that Charles Martinet, professional voice actor, is the now-retired voice of Mario?
- CM30 3y agoMartinet is indeed the exception here, and one of the most well known voice actors ever. But there are plenty of other examples where my post holds true. The ghosts from Luigi's Mansion 3 are voiced by Next Level Games development and marketing staff, the voice for Yoshi is Nintendo composer Kazumi Totaka, Shy Guys are voiced by Nintendo of America localisation manager Nate Bihldorff, the WarioWare cast were voiced by Treehouse (localisation) staff until WarioWare Gold, Donkey Kong 64 had Rare's staff voicing characters (like composer Grant Kirkhope as DK himself), etc.
- philistine 3y agoYou're not wrong, but you're going a bit historical there with DK 64, which came out in the 90s. On top of that, British developers were notorious for picking employees for voice work. Nintendo still uses internal staff for incidental stuff, but you can see the trend of professionalization. Tears of the Kingdom came out on the same day around the world with a large professional voice cast for every supported language. That's where Nintendo is going.
- WeylandYutani 3y agoInteresting I've been playing videogames games since 1998 and never knew that but I've also never played a Mario game.