SAG-AFTRA Calls Interactive Media Strike Authorization Vote
SAG-AFTRA Puts Video Game Makers On Notice With Strike Authorization Vote Plan
"SAG-AFTRA is standing up to tyranny on behalf of its members,” stated president Fran Drescher.
Does Troy Baker suck? I know he voices he a ton of characters but I've never heard of anything about him personally.
And ya, this is a great step forward. Like movies and tv, the video game industry is rife with the money taking advantage of people. Maybe even more, because there's less union backing in video games.
From the lede of his Wikipedia article:
In early 2022, Baker was the subject of controversy due to his partnership with an NFT company that had been revealed to have plagiarized voice lines generated from 15.ai, an artificial intelligence text-to-speech project developed by an MIT student, as part of their marketing campaign.
So yeah, seems like he might well suck.
Curious. Does this strangely help game devs avoid crunch? If the stories and acting can't be completed, does that buy them more time to just make the gameplay?
It depends.
If the game is already cast and VO/performance hasn't been entirely recorded yet, then yes, it will grind production to a halt.
If the game hasn't been cast yet, some studios might decide to go record VO in the UK instead. Typically that leads to lower quality unless the cast needs to be British. The American voice actor pool in the UK is much smaller than the U.S. for obvious reasons, and that leads to much lower quality of performance.
So basically, it will slow down productions if they don't have the option to go to the UK instead. For everything else, it depends how badly a studio wants to release within the given time frame, but there are options.
No. Not unless devs unionize. More time to make the game doesn't mean less crunch, it'll usually mean more crunch as crunch used to be a month or so before release and is now just the entire time a game is in production. So a longer production just means more crunch.
Crunch is a worker power problem, it's companies taking advantage of the power they have over workers who can't individually refuse.