A strike is looming. SAG-AFTRA members who perform voices for interactive video games will withhold services beginning on October 21 if they don't like the contract that game producers are offering at that time. It currently looks like the two sides are far apart and the work stoppage is likely…but it often looks that way at this stage of a contentious negotiation.
There seem to be many outstanding issues. One is that the actors want limitations on how long they must work on a project that requires a lot of screaming and stress on the vocal cords. That's a very legitimate concern. If you've ever attended one of my Cartoon Voices panels at Comic-Con, you've heard actors tell their horror stories of having to vocally "die" in hundreds of different ways because the video game offers a hundred different ways in which their character might perish. They go home from work sounding like the Frankenstein Monster with laryngitis…not a good thing to have happen a lot when you make your living with your voice.
There's also a weird series of demands from the game companies that they should be able to fine actors who are late for sessions or who in somebody's opinion aren't "fully engaged" in their work. They also want to fine agents — or even have agencies' license revoked — if an agency refuses to send its clients in for auditions. I don't get that at all. Keep in mind that if you're a videogame company and some agent refuses to send his clients to your company for auditions, the only conceivable reason is that you have a history of mistreating actors. Also, remember that actors have every right to not audition if they don't wanna.
But you should also keep in mind that some demands in a negotiation are only there so they can be dropped. For years, the producers who were negotiating with the Writers Guild would always make some demand at first to be able to screw with screen credits and to not have to correct them if they were wrong. They didn't really want that. They wanted to be able to give us a meaningless (for them) "win" when they dropped that demand, hoping we'd then feel like we won something when we didn't win on The Money.
Which brings us to The Money. That's what this threatened strike is really about. It's what 98% of all threatened strikes are really about. Some of these videogames are so profitable that the actors feel their wages should be adjusted upwards, including some sort of royalties or bonus payments. The game producers don't want to share that wealth. Everything else can probably be settled if they can settle on The Money.
My sense is that the actors are pretty militant on this. SAG took some rotten deals in the past for voice actors and a lot of performers are determined to not let that happen again, especially in a work area which looks to be the main source of employment for decades to come. The companies will probably have to give more than they want to but the union may have to walk and continue walking for a time until that happens. As most new videogames spend a long time in the pipeline, consumers will probably not notice any lag in production for a long time…but there's too much profit on the line for the companies to gamble with more non-union amateurs than they now sometimes employ.
This will get settled. It just may take a while.