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Kristophe
Obi-Wan Kermobi
Joined: 26 Apr 2004
Posts: 4
Location: The Outer Banks of NC, USA |
| No Strike! Voice Actors Settle - News @ Shacknews |
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Shacknews reporter, Alec Matias, brings us the <a href="http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/37325" target="_blank">word</a> that there will not be a video games voice actor strike...
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<br><blockquote><em>It's official: the two unions representing videogame voice actors withdrew their demand of residuals and have accepted the offer made by videogame publishers. Just yesterday, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) counted the mailed-in ballots from their members and apparently they did not have enough support to authorize a strike. Their only recourse was to accept a three and a half year contract offer that now gives voice actors the following benefits:
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<br>An immediate 25 percent increase in minimum wages from $556 to $695 for a four-hour session for up to three voices with increases in subsequent years, bringing the daily rate up to $759.
<br>Double time pay after six hours (previously ten hours) for three-voice performers.
<br>A 7.5 percent increase in contributions to the unions' benefits plans, bringing the rate up to 14.3 percent.
<br>15-25 percent gains in rates for remote delivery and integration.
<br>Payment to actors for reuse of performances in promotional films longer than 12 minutes.
<br>A specified rest period for each hour spent recording.
<br>Payment window shortened from 30 to 12 business days.
<br>Pre-work notification to actors performing in stressful sessions.
<br>The offer still needs approval in committee, but if approved, it'll last until the end of 2008. Even with all these new benefits, the unions are not satisfied and were clear in their message that they hope to build a stronger union to try again in 2009 to secure a "more fair" deal.
<br></em></blockquote>
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<br>I would assume this would mean that at least one game developer might make their scheduled release date after all then:-) |
Thu Jun 09, 2005 3:18 pm |
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yeesh
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 03 May 2002
Posts: 113
Location: Unofficially representing Queens |
Of course, in principle I must say more power to anyone trying to stick it to the man. OTOH, when did voice acting start mattering to everybody, and to be more blunt, what's wrong with you idiots (by which I mean all gamers everywhere)? For a few years now, actually intelligent and experienced game reviewers have been taking points off of games for a lack of voice acting, despite the fact that voice acting adds nothing to games except 1) install size bloat, 2) performance degradation, 3) gender neutral dialogue (in our old friend Dungeon Lords, as a matter of fact, I was quite confused when at a certain part my enemy ordered his paople to attack me by saying, "guards, kill them!"; I wondered is there someone else on my side for the fight? Nope, just couldn't afford to do a "kill her" and a "kill him". But did anyone ever use gender-neutral pronouns in ancient times? Lame, lame, lame. But I digress), and of course, 4) unintentional hilarity, due to inevitable lousiness.
I wonder if the NY Times Book Review will start penalizing new novels for not including at least 5,000 spoken lines of dialogue. Ooo, or maybe we can get websites to babble audibly at us all day long instead of that whole tedious reading them way we do it now. Use your frigging brains and read the text, instead of getting some idiot to ruin the effect and add cost to the game with voice acting. God I hate you gamers. |
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Thu Jun 09, 2005 3:31 pm |
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Ratavuk
Noble Knight
Joined: 08 May 2005
Posts: 213
Location: I-Net |
quote:
For a few years now, actually intelligent and experienced game reviewers have been taking points off of games for a lack of voice acting, despite the fact that voice acting adds nothing to games except 1) install size bloat, 2) performance degradation, 3) gender neutral dialogue
Well i think install sizes shouldn't be a problem today as there are hd's with more space than you will ever need. I don't think that voices eat up too much performance until you own a computer that's older than let's say 5 years. That's really no problem today anymore you know. I wonder that you don't name graphics evolution as performance killer numer one.
Of course you can make multiple times better dialogues with written words than with voice acting. It's the same as with books and movies. There are people who always say that a book is always deeper than a movie in term of dialogues. But do you call people who are going to the cinema idiots ?
So ask yourself, what do you really want ? Do you want text adventures back like twenty years ago ?
I don't think so. You can't stop evolution  |
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Thu Jun 09, 2005 5:51 pm |
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Guest
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I can understand deals like this with big corp funded games. Small devs hoping to have decent voice acting just got screwed though. Its a tyranny of the 5% most funded games that will ruin video gaming with shallow gameplay and expensive window dressing. |
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Fri Jun 10, 2005 1:55 am |
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Guest
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Ratavuk:
Revolution or decline? Frankly, good rpgs and adventures from a decade ago had far better dialog than the crap we get today from so called "top rated games". The thing is that developers are now given word limits and such which limit both the scope and the depth of their titles due to, you guessed it, voice acting. Voice acting is very expensive. The more you have to pay the voice actors the less you have to pay the developers.
Frankly, I will take old school rpgs, with its oodles of varied dialog, to the badly written Eastern bloc titles or the big budget crap like NWN (which is as shallow as it is crappy). |
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Fri Jun 10, 2005 2:03 am |
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yeesh
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 03 May 2002
Posts: 113
Location: Unofficially representing Queens |
quote:
There are people who always say that a book is always deeper than a movie in term of dialogues. But do you call people who are going to the cinema idiots ?
To be clear, I call all people idiots all the time, whether they go to the movies or not. But this is not a comparison of two different art forms, like between books and movies. This is the "evolution" of a certain aspect of one artform (if we might be so grandiose), and it just doesn't bring anything to the table. Graphics can do more than text, and 3-D lets you do things you just can't do with 2-D. Heck, even 3-D positional audio has some stupid little advantage. But voice acting simply takes some (but not all, which to me begs the question of why do any) of the voices and dialogue out of the hands of the player's imagination and puts it into the hands of B-grade actors with atrocious accents. And all this would be bad enough, but it actually costs money and processing power to boot? How lame is that? Dear game developers: Please spend that money on anything else!
The fact that video games (certainly CRPGs at least) and written text go hand and hand is undisputable. Even if every stupid line of dialogue were read to us (which once again it never is), we'll still always have to be literate enough to read our character and inventory screens (and ideally our quest logs). Since we're reading anyway, why waste energy on the babbling? It's stupid. And I never like the way my character sounds.
Although, having spent some time watching someone play Psychonauts lately, I do admit that sometimes it can be done well. But those console developers have all the money in the world. |
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Fri Jun 10, 2005 6:39 am |
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