Booze Zombie said:
Game companies don't respect voice acting talent, I've been hearing about this for some time.
I have mixed opinions on the subject.
In the past I've talked about corruption in the games industry and the fact that I think people are being overpaid. When I look at some of the price tags attached to games it's pretty ridiculous, I mean even with hundreds of employees when your spending a quarter of a billion dollars to produce a video game something is wrong. I think a big part of it is the fact that a lot of people in the industry have simply gotten TOO greedy and are demanding what amounts to lavish fees for doing very little. Much like Hollywood.
I point this out because the sheer amount of money tossed into games is one of the excuses used to try and justify the high prices. Albeit the high prices are also largely because nobody in the goverment cares enough to prevent them from engaging in price fixing (like when the industry as a whole pulled a $10 price hike), and the simple fact that with price fixing it means that a game costing a quarter of a billion (I refer to Modern Warfare 2 here), and one developed on a shoestring both wind up costing the same price upon release.
Going into voice acting I am looking at people basically whining about getting paid $200.00 an hour, and I think that represents a mentality that is destroying the game industry, and hurting us gamers as a whole. Sure, it can be argued that 'voice actors' are a skilled profession but so are a lot of things that make a lot less money than they do. I think the basic issue is the fact that they feel they CAN demand more money given these ridiculous budgets so they are going to do so.
Truthfully this is pretty lulzworthy because back when I was seriously following Anime a lot of magazines and such did articles on voice actors since they were just coming into demand to produce quality dubs and such. The basic gist of it was that these guys were doing it for peanuts and were lucky if they could support themselves at it, mostly sticking in voice acting as a labor of love.
Now voice acting is taking off because video games want to use these guys too, and while I can see wanting to be able to support themselves, saying that a contract is "unfair" if they make $200.00 an hour is absolutly ridiculous. I think in this case the "Screen Actors Guild" is pretty much demonstrating the worst aspects of union behavior.
What's more demands this this trickle down to use consumers, because really the game industry is so excessively greedy and wasteful today, they aren't just going to "eat" the costs. Rather they will wind up hiking the price of a game another $5-$10 to cover it and leave us holding the check so to speak.
So basically my attitude is that they should pretty much tell the Voice Actors "have a nice life" and work around them with synthetic voice programs, volunteers, or whatever. Truthfully I'd rather suffer a year worth of cr@ppy voice acting... which we get half the time anyway... than have these guys dictating their pay rate quite this way because in the long run that hurts me.
I mean honestly, it's guys going from "I'm happy to make a living, and still have to do other jobs" to "Well geez, I need more money so I can afford that second Lamborgini and a garage expansion to hold it because of the space my boat is taking up next to the first one". There *IS* a middle ground. Nobody who makes $3,200 a month for working 4 hours a week is going to tug at my heart strings. Even if they do 20 differant voices and read a thousand lines in that time, it's still only four bloody hours. Plus for all their cries about strain I'd feel it's a safe bet that these guys are doing other jobs, and probably hitting every studio needing voice work in town that they can find.
