SAG rejects voice-acting agreement

Reuters is reporting that the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) yesterday officially rejected a proposed agreement by game publishers to increase wages for voice work, opting to further negotiate a new deal.

The contract was voted down on Tuesday by SAG's national executive committee by a small margin. The camps had previously reached a tentative agreement, with a SAG negotiating committee publicly "approving" the deal at the eleventh hour, narrowly avoiding a potential strike.

"With great reluctance, our negotiating committee concluded that it is in the interests of the members who work these contracts to make this deal," SAG president Melissa Gilbert said just hours before the potential strike.

Officials were to count votes by union members to approve or reject the game publishers' offer of increased wages that would see voice actors accrue a 36 percent pay raise over the duration of the contract. SAG members wanted residual payments based on a game's success.

With titles such as Microsoft's Halo 2 and Take-Two Interactive's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas selling millions of copies worldwide and netting hundreds of millions in revenue, actors who provide the voices for game characters felt they deserved a cut.

Others don't think so. Yankee Group analyst Mike Goodman told the Associated Press, "[The voice actors] have no leverage. In 99 percent of all games, the voice actors are irrelevant. You replace one voice actor with another, nonunion actor, and no one will know the difference."

Many in the gaming community agree. A forum poster going by the handle "Parallax Abstraction" on gaming Web site Blue's News says, "All you have to do is listen to David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson's 'performances' in [Midway Games'] Area 51 to understand that Hollywood voice actors are neither necessary, nor worth anything more than the developers who all but destroy themselves to make the games they love."

The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), a smaller union of professional actors, has not changed its stance and will go under contract beginning July 1. Actors who are dual members of both SAG and AFTRA will be free to work under the game publishers' contract, provided AFTRA's approval does not change.

Although developers have been including big-name actors into games recently (James Caan and Robert Duvall in EA's The Godfather, Heather Graham in EverQuest II, to cite a couple), SAG's rejection is unlikely to greatly affect gaming. It is becoming more common for developers, in an effort to keep production costs down, to use nonunion actors for voice work.