Actors Tilt Toward Video Game Strike

Negotiations have broken down between SAG/AFTRA and a group of video game companies including: Electronic Arts, Activision, Blindlight, Insomniac Games, Interactive Associates, Rockstar Games and VoiceWorks Prods.

Per Backstage.com:

The companies’ lead negotiator, attorney Howard Fabrick, said that the unions’ stance was “disappointing” considering that the final offer was an expansion of health benefits and a 35% increase in pay. Voice-over work represents a small fraction of a video game’s development and consumer enjoyment,” Fabrick said. “The union’s demand for an equity stake, or residual structure, is unreasonable and not fair to the hundreds of people who often spend years in developing a game.” Union members already have voted overwhelmingly to allow their elected leaders to call a strike if need be. There was no indication when that decision might come. (According to SAG/AFTRA) “It is simply short-sighted to believe that consumers don’t care about the artistic quality of the characters.”

IndependentSources asks:

Have the SAG/AFTRA negotiators have never played a video game? Can they name one successful video game where the union voiceover or acting talent is integral to the game’s success? Tetris and Super Mario Bros. didn’t need AFTRA/SAG talent and all that union talent on the Matrix video game didn’t keep it from bombing.

Video games are successful because of the addictive game play not the voice over talent. It will take one nano-second to make the games completely non-union and there will be little or no difference to most games. Do you think that game players will stop buying “Grand Theft Auto” because the voice over was done by someone who was not a card carrying member of AFTRA? Will “Call of Duty” will somehow become less of an addicting game because the voice over talent isn’t getting residuals? Will teenage boys put “Boycott X-Box” bumper stickers on their cars? Will Jessie Jackson demonstrate his unity with the strikers by announcing that he’ll no longer host Halo2 games on the Rainbow Coalition servers?

In sum, SAG/AFTRA, this is really a very, very bad idea.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 at 10:49 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.