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Niko Bellic vs Niko Bellic
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Learning to code isnt hard. Learning to code well, is. And there is a slew of artists and musicians working on a game as well, where they use their god given talents and training to create the world and characters. I dont see them clamoring for residuals.
As for the "he wont have work for a while" statement... tough shit. There is a ,lot of professions based on contract work, where there is a lot of down-time between jobs, and again... no residuals.
I'm absolutely fine with them asking for 10%. If they are worth it, then the company will give it to them.
It's about extracting your full worth. If you can lend a name to a movie or game that will increase sales by 15%, what's the problem with asking for a portion of that?
In this case, hundreds of other voice actors could have done the voice for Niko, so he didn't have the negotiating power to ask for a cut of profits. He simply wasn't worth it.
Not a successful one.
It's fine to want it, but if other voice actors are willing to take the same pay without residuals, why should Rockstar pay more than the market rate for a voice actor?
If you are suggesting that all voice actors in games should get residuals, then they need to organize like the writer's union did. To expect a company to pay extra just because it's "fair" is silly if they can get the same performance out of someone else for less.
To be fair, this is exactly what he's saying. He's complaining because his union crafted the contract, and they didn't get him anything like that. He's not blaming Rockstar at all.
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EDIT: Wow, he's even done a hilarious skit about the... Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair photo session
Because he actually pays dues to the SAG, and they don't?
Sure you can - Hollywood's been doing it for years. That said, you may have a system more like what the below-the-line crew uses, where the money goes to fund the staff pension plan and health benefits, instead of being paid directly.
Um, they are organized, through the SAG. The main issue is that the SAG's contract with game companies doesn't include a residual provision - and that was a MAJOR point of contention the last time it was up for negotiation. I don't think the companies can hold the line for much longer, though.
Give up? It was $0.02. And they were fighting for a doubling of that. So no, I don't see residuals as being something that will break the bank.
Edit: Also, people forget that under contract work, you're paid directly, and any taxes are on your head. So $100K sounds nice - till you realize that he's going to pay a nice chunk of that in taxes.
$100.000 is a LOT of money for one job as a voice actor. I doubt voice acting pays extraordinarily well, given the immense amount of jobs you need to take if you want to do it as a living (see the IMDB pages of famous voice actors like Grey DeLisle for instance).
It's difficult to say how much they deserve to get, though. Unless we're talking about really recognizable voices like the cast of The Simpsons, voice actors are generally replacable. It's not that I don't think they should get more money, but I can certainly see why they're having such a hard time. If they don't have a union they should damn well get on it.
It's funny you brought up the Simpsons cast. They just went on de facto strike that will shorten next season by like five episodes because they wanted a bump from 360 to 500 thousand an episode.
Bunch of assholes
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
If the SAG has the ability to combine negotiating power enough to get better contracts, I'm *absolutely* fine with it. If they aren't leveraging their combined power to the fullest extent they can, it's their problem, not the game producers'.
They have the power to demand it, though. In the end, they will likely be worth $500,000 an episode.
What's kind of hilarious about this is that compared to famous face stars on similarly popular shows, they are making a tiny amount of money. Remember when the cast of Friends was making $1 mil each per episode? Simpsons has a much huger draw and they're striking to make half of that.
In game voice acting, the actor is lucky if they even receive credit for it. One of my friends didn't even know he had a title credit in Eternal Sonata until I played the game and saw it. "Holy shit, they put my name on it?" was his response.
Voice actors get it pretty rough in the games industry, but they put up with it because the pay is way better than in animation because the budgets tend to be higher.
Not all are SAG. Some are AFTRA, which is more studio-friendly than SAG.
SAG's probably looking at a strike this summer, and this'll probably be one of their issues. The companies will probably follow the studios and try to negotiate an easier deal with AFTRA, then try to get SAG to accept the same deal (same as they did with the DGA during the WGA strike).
Except they do get residuals. It's just that their residual system works differently - instead of each member getting the money directly, the residuals instead go to fund their pension and health plans.
Seriously, wasn't anyone paying attention during the WGA strike?
No, I was to busy bitching about writers and watching reruns through netflix to get into some new tv shows
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
He obviously did the work over 15 months, not that he worked for over 15 months on it. There's no way he has enough work to do with his voices and motion capture that it'd take an actual 40hrs a day, 5 days a week, for 15 goddamn months. Even if he voiced everybody in the game, it wouldn't take that long. Even with re-takes. Unless he's a moron... in which case, they'd have canned him after the 50th try of "Hey, it's a me!! Mario!!... er Niko."
My understanding is that all employees at Craigslist have a share in profits. So do people who work at Half Price books.
Good on him, then.
2. I don't have a NYT login.
2. Bugmenot
I see this as them trying to put themselves in a better bargaining position for those later projects.
A couple of people have commented on this a couple times, but I just wanted to add that while anyone can code, talented coders are not particularly common. The top 5% can easily produce 4x as much work as your average coder, and yet they're still invisible - not because they're more common, but because programmers simply don't have celebrity status, which means they don't get bargaining power. (With very few exceptions.)
I don't know about that. I would think that if someone really were 4x as productive as 95% of the people in their profession, they could negotiate pretty damn well. If someone is that big of an asset to the company they could make it work.
While celebrity status certainly helps, I don't think that it is the deciding factor in how much you can negotiate.
Why not shut the fuck up and try to negotiate something there? That or start doing more lucrative voice work, like in animated films.
They could have done the sessions for DLC the same time as the rest of the game. I would be surprised if they didn't, in fact.
After looking at the Cell documentation, the idea that I'll probably have to code a complicated multithreaded application for it later this summer is giving me nightmares; whoever at Rockstar managed to extract more power out of that piece of shit than they could out of the relatively straightforward Xenon is getting a great deal more of my respect than any voice actor.
I don't think this is true on a general scale, and its definitely not true where I work at. People who can code well, which has more to do with architecture of the code than actually writing it, get paid extremely well and are high demand. You're not going to make millions, but making good money.
They can, and do.
I just wanted to say how much this kind of shit pisses me off. Why should some coders get more respect than an actor? Because their job doesn't require complex mathematics they don't deserve the same amount of respect for their work?
I mean what does an actor do in a typical workday? They stand around waiting a lot, that's what. They read some lines a bunch of times, they smoke a cigarette or two. Their day ends at six, seven o'clock.
A typical game programmer pounds away at impossibly complicated shit in a hot room all day until his brain begs for mercy and leaks out his ears. Then he sits in interminable meetings about totally pointless shit. Then he pounds away at impossibly complicated shit in a hot room all night until his brain begs for mercy and leaks out his ears.
Most of the actors I've met are hopelessly depressed pill-poppers anyway.
Don't get me wrong. A game is a team effort and everyone deserves equal credit for their contributions. But pretending you're someone else in a somewhat convincing manner, on a microphone, is a much easier (and probably more rewarding) way to make money than programming. You probably don't need a B.Sc to do it, either.