On May 21st, the New York Times, which, as an old-school New Yorker I still read in its tree-killing, broadsheet edition, ran an article which made my blood boil. It was about some obscure actor who apparently provided the voice for Niko, in GTA IV. It was basically an extended whine on the part of the actor about how people who provide voices for high-grossing movies earn high residuals, and all he got was a lousy $100k for his work. And much foofaraw about how SGA agreements require much higher rates of reimbursement for movies and TV work than they do for fuckin games.
Oh, what a shame, right? Fella who is a no-name acting talent gets his big break, and all he gets is a lousy hundred thousand dollars. My heart bleeds.
Now, let's parse this a little. In a movie, acting talent is major -- sure, pace Hitchcock, they're just cattle, and anyone who thinks about film seriously will agree that certainly the director and the screenwriter are primary creators, and maybe you throw in the producer before you get to the leads. But the actors are really, really important, because they're on-screen on the time, and they're the faces the audience identifies with. And everyone is recompensed on Hollywood scale, meaning, for the rest of us (unless we're investment bankers or top management at publicly traded firms) beyond the dreams of avarice.
But in a game, the key talents are the lead designer, lead programmer, art director, and lead producer. If you want to go down the priority scale, the rest of the programming team, the level designers, the modelers and animators, and the assistant producers are highly important. They are the core creators of the game.
Now, bad voice acting is really annoying, and can distract from your enjoyment of a game; but the actual voices are not a big deal, nor are you likely to search out and purchase a game because it has voice acting from one of your idols. "Niko voiced by Tim Allen?" I think not. The voice actors here really are cattle -- you need to have sufficient casting nous to make sure they're decent, but beyond that, they're a commodity. Pay them what SAG demands for animated film? FUCK that.
I'm looking at the credits for GTA IV on Mobygames, and they don't list anyone as designer (for shame), but Leslie Benzies is producer; Aaron Garbut is art director; and Adam Fowler, Alexander Roger, and Obbe Vermeij are listed as "technical directors" (which I assume translates into technical leads). Dan Houser and Robert Humphries are credited as "written by", which is a hard credit to parse -- they might just have written some dialog, or they might actually be the true designers.
Nonetheless, my guess is that not a single person on this list gets a dime, regardless of how many copies GTA IV sells. They are, in all likelihood, all full-time employees of Rockstar North, the studio that developed the game -- or, perhaps, freelancers who received flat fee payments for their work.
Some schmuck voice actor should receive a share of the net before the talents who actually made a difference to the title?
Just, you know, rape me now, and shoot me later. What a hugely offensive idea.
And then....
This Sunday, I turn to the Arts & Leisure section, and at the top of the fold is a picture of someone I never expected to see there in my life: Shigeru Miyamoto.
And open the fold, and there's not one, but six picture of him, playing Wii Fit. I suspect the genesis of the article is promo from a Nintendo PR flack pushing the game -- yet this is actually a well-informed discussion of Miyamoto's career and impact on the industry. It wasn't that long ago--more than 10 but less than 15 years--that Game Developer ran an article asking why no one knew the name of the industry's most important creator -- and now some proportion of the Times readership does. This is extremely cool, but I won't hold my breath looking for follow-up pieces on Garriot, Garfield, Naja, Crawford, Dani Bunten, Carmack, Spector, etc.... Will Wright will get press, of course, and Sid Meier maybe, but it would be nice if the MSM got the idea eventually that any creative medium has creators.
Both pieces by Seth Schiesel, oddly enough; how it is that one writer can be both clueful and clueless?
Link to the articles
If they're online that is, I'd be quite interested to read the Miyamoto peice and as I'm across the pond in what would be known in your neck of the woods as a 'hick town' getting my hands on a copy of the NYT is a bit tricky. (edit: a little work with google and I get this.)
I'd be willing to bet that videogame work dries up for the voice of Nico, whiney little nobody.
Call me cynical if you like,
Call me cynical if you like, but that looks like a case of "oh shit, that job I took that turned into a really great seller - I should have asked for more money!"
Were I in his position, I'd probably be out there striking while the iron was hot, getting my name out there as a "serious actor", trying to turn my success into some more work, and maybe talking to the New York Times as an exercise in self-promotion... oh wait.
The article's still an interesting look into the media industry/mentality, regardless of whether one thinks it should be imitated in games or not.
Oh, and I'm available for voice acting work if anyone needs it ;-)
How it should be
I completely do not understand these people who think they should be paid for their work according to how successful the results of their work end up being. The way I see it, there are two types of people, employees and investors.
Employees are laborers. They do work, and get paid for it. They also have no risk. Even if the end result of their labor is a total flop and sells 0 copies, they still get their salaries, and they still feed their families and pay rent. This is how employees should be paid.
Investors are the people who provide the initial money that allows the project to be done in the first place. They are the people paying all these salaries. If the product is a flop, they lose all that money. They are taking a huge risk. In the end, they get paid according to the success or failure of the result of the labor.
If you want to get paid a flat rate no matter what, then you should be an employee. If you want to get paid an amount proportional to the results, then you should be an investor. You can not expect to take no risks, yet somehow get the benefits of increased rewards. The rewards are for the risk-takers.
If this voice actor wants to be paid proportionally, then this is how he can do it. He first provides his voice acting talent for free. We'll consider that a $100,000 investment in the game. Then, we'll take that $100,000 and figure out what percentage of the total game budget that compromises. I've heard people say the game cost $100 million, so that's %0.1. Alright, so he'll get %0.1 of the profits of the game. If he wants to be paid that way, he'll have to take the risk of not being paid at all.
Hollick's got a point. So sue me.
While Michael Hollick's approach to the issues may not impress Costik, I think the actor's reasoning is certainly worth discussing in a less condescending and dismissive tone than in this post. This is what Hollick actually said in the NY Times article:
"Obviously I'm incredibly thankful to Rockstar for the opportunity to be in this game when I was just a nobody, an unknown quantity," Mr. Hollick, 35, said [...] "But it's tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they're making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don't see any of it. I don't blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games. Yes, the technology is important, but it's the human performances within them that people really connect to, and I hope actors will get more respect for the work they do within those technologies. [...] The first G.T.A. IV trailer generated something like 40 million hits online, and that’s my voice all over it, and I get nothing. If that were a radio spot, I would have. Same thing for the TV ads. I recorded those lines for the game, but now they’re all over television. It’s another gray area.” (emphasis added)
As is made perfectly clear by this quote (although not by Costik's representation of Hollick's position), Hollick is not denigrating Rockstar's tireless efforts to produce a high-quality game, he is primarily criticizing his own union. I think anyone who isn't quite as viciously Manichean about the distinction between voice acting in games and acting in movies as Costik seems to be can appreciate that Hollick's basic arguments are at least worth considering.
Admittely, it could be argued that Hollick overstates the relative importance of voice acting in games. But in the case of a game like GTA4, I personally couldn't imagine that I would have been remotely as interested in the story (yes, I'm very much a story-oriented, "non-ulillillia" kind of gamer) without the solid voice acting. The same goes, I would argue, for many other recent titles ("Mass Effect", "BioShock" etc.) as well as countless older classics (including but not limited to traditional adventure games such as Funcom's "The Longest Journey"*, story-heavy hybrids such as Cryo's original "Dune" and Quantic Dream's "Fahrenheit" and even dungeon crawlers like Westwood's "Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos" or Dreamforge's "Anvil of Dawn"). Incidentally, I recently played through Clover Studios' "Okami" (a game with many tediously long cutscenes), which I couldn't help but thinking would have benefitted greatly from (real) voice acting despite having a rather unremarkable script.
In conclusion, I do think there is a real case to be made for Hollick's assertion that it is "the human performances within [games] that people really connect to".
(*Regarding Costik's "Niko voiced by Tim Allen" argument, in the Swedish version of TLJ that I played through the major character was competently voice acted by (domestically) well-known singer/actress Regina Lund. I'm not sure whether that boosted the games' sales, but it very well may have.)
Wrong way round
I'm surprised that so many people reading that article react in a "who is he to ask for this" instead of "why aren't we asking for it too?" Designers, producers, writers, and art directors are all employees -- a state not too different from the early movie studios, with their carefully-managed stable of actors under contract. It doesn't take much imagination to see the game industry changing the way the film industry has.
Designers
The credits page on IMDB lists Simon Lashley and Keith McLeman as "senior deisgners".
As to who should or shouldn't get royalties - frankly, the fact that the actor has an SAG rate to complain about and the people that build the game qua game don't looks to me more like an argument in favor of unionizing the games industry than it does against giving actors royalties...
This is an evolutionary thing
I think it is instructive here to look at animated films. For many years they used voice talent that was well known in animation, but not more widely, and they paid very badly. More recently, studios have noticed that known voice actors help their animated films gross more; so they use better known actors and pay more.
GTAIV will presumably have paid what it needed to. I didn't click through to find out how much work was involved in the $100,000 paycheck, but it doesn't sound too shabby to me. In the future, we may find games determining that it's worth their while to have Ian McKellen doing their voice acting; in which case I suspect they will pay more.
Link to Miyamoto Piece
Oh, sorry... I'd meant to include a link to it, but blipped on it. I edited to add it into the text, but it's here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/arts/television/25schi.html?_r=1&scp=1...
Garriot, Garfield, Naja,
Garriot, Garfield, Naja, Crawford, Dani Bunten, Carmack, Spector, etc
It'd be great if you did a series of posts covering these luminaries. Point out their major contributions and such.
NiteOwl: That's a good
NiteOwl: That's a good idea.
Personally, I think game designers should have net revenue deals in place, and have found in my producing work that offering back-end incentives does a lot to inspire and motivate creative people to do great work.
Wil Wheaton
Wil Wheaton has talked about this issue from the POV of a voice actor in the past.
Eminent Designers
Perhaps I will... Something to consider, at any event.
I don't understand what's
I don't understand what's wrong with voice work being voice work, whether for a video game or an animated film. In both cases, the people crafting the experience are different from the "talent," and while I certainly agree that fame and residuals should be apportioned fairly, I don't know why we have to be angry at the people standing next to us in the picket line. Just because designers should be payed like directors doesn't mean that actors shouldn't be payed like actors.
That's not the point
The point is that the actual creative talent is being paid a wage. I see no reason that someone whose contribution to the title is as minor as that of a voice actor should be paid on a superior basis. Indeed, it would be extraordinarily unfair if he were.
The problem with Niko's argument...
At some point, this voice actor (presumably) signed an employment contract. In that contract, it (presumably) stated a flat fee for work received.
So, at what point is said voice actor NOT responsible for signing something he didn't read?
You can say that his union should have protected him. I say that's similar to getting yourself scammed out of gold and items in an MMO, and then complaining that the developers should have prevented it. Bzzt. Wrong answer. The correct answer is, negotiate the terms of your work agreement up front.
And then you ask for royalties, and the developer tells you to go screw yourself, they'll find someone else, and you have to decide how much you want the part. Fine, but either way the terms are on the table, no fair whining about it after the fact.
Anyway, it's not like the success of GTA IV is a huge surprise to anyone. "Oops, I didn't expect it to be so popular when I started working on it, I guess I should have asked for royalties!" Seriously?
Compensation
Greg, the odds are high that most of the people from the GTA IV credits you mentioned got very well compensated for their work (and deservedly so). Remember that old story about $25M Take 2 earmarked for keeping talent happy? I would be very surprised if some of that didn't go to exactly those people. (And FWIW Dan Houses is Sam Houser's brother.)