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Niko Bellic vs Niko Bellic
Lion
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Michael Hollick is the voice of Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto 4. I think the game grossed about a half billion dollars in the first week. The game has been rumoured (or reported, I don't know) to cost $100 million to make. Mr. Hollick is being paid $100,000 over 15 months.
Full article here
He is the voice of Niko Bellic and, arguably, added much of who Niko is as a character. But what about the animators, writers, people doing mo-cap, programmers, and the scores of other people, including the other actors, who worked on GTA4? Don't they equally or more so determine who Niko is? How do you quantify someones contribution to something this big?
Please keep this to video games. A SAG vs WGA vs DGA vs MPAA is hairy enough as is.
Kotaku wrote:“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 last week...“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.
Full article here
He is the voice of Niko Bellic and, arguably, added much of who Niko is as a character. But what about the animators, writers, people doing mo-cap, programmers, and the scores of other people, including the other actors, who worked on GTA4? Don't they equally or more so determine who Niko is? How do you quantify someones contribution to something this big?
Please keep this to video games. A SAG vs WGA vs DGA vs MPAA is hairy enough as is.
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I say the same thing about people who buy something for $40, then complain when it drops in price the next week to $30. If you are happy paying $40 for a product, why do you care what other people are paying?
What did he expect from Rockstar? "Oh, we made as much money as we expected. 500% bonuses for all of our external contractors!"
Maybe he should have negotiated to have a salary based on sales?
edit* Does anyone know how much Ray Liotta got for doing Vice City?
So maybe he should try to be on TV or in a movie, I guess. Still no room for complaint. He knew the terms, and he could have been replaced by another guy who was probably just as good and willing to take $110,000.
If your talent is worth $100,000 (ie, that's what others will pay for it, and that's what you will accept for it), then why do you expect people to give you more? People like this guy have a fucked up view of worth. It's like the housing market. People thought their homes were "worth" whatever Zillow.com told them. Fuck that; worth is determined by two people: buyer and seller. Not some website. A lot of people found out the hard way that buyers aren't really interested in what Zillow has to say.
It's a gem on your resume. Treat it as such and quit whining about terms you agreed to.
His comments were actually to the New York Times
I should link this in the OP because kotaku took the most jack-assed part of the article. That's what I get from not checking the source.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH2nirEuO-k
XBL : lJesse Custerl | MWO: Jesse Custer | Best vid ever. | 2nd best vid ever.
Similarly, I supported the writers strike. They thought something wasn't fair, so they didn't accept the terms.
I really don't see any reason why voice actors should get residuals any more than programmers do.And no matter how huge the game is they can't give them to everyone who worked on it and still expect to make a profit..so it seems a moot point to me.
I guess it's more a matter of trying to maximize bargaining power.
The guy who voiced Nico Bellic did a great job, but he was in no position to negotiate strongly for the job. Voice actors seldom are, simply because there's (theoretically) a wide pool of talent, and consumers rarely buy products on the basis of the voice acting being done by particular voice actors (with some exception for "real" celebrities filling in as voice actors).
On the other hand things other people have pointed out in this thread are why, despite being told by numerous people that I should do some demo tapes for voice over/acting that I'm not really interested in it at all. While I apparently have some sort of talent for it, it's not something I'm interested in because it's, well I guess, "show-biz".
This shit isn't a guarenteed income. It's a crap-shoot where the deciding factors aren't even random. They're how much people in charge like you and your talent and the fickleness of the general public. Fuck that noise. I'd rather work in a call center for $15/hour and know that I'm getting a paycheck next week.
While there's a hundred people that actually did more than 15 months of work on this game. Not only don't they get residuals, but if the game does poorly they probably lose their jobs. Of course this game was going to do well, but that's the reward side of taking risks on new franchises and cultivating them.
And most games don't do well. So actors depending on residuals would get fucked if they put in work in a game that's one of the majority that fails.
He doesn't take the risks, doesn't put in as much work as the majority of everyone that works on the game, doesn't even sell the game with his name, and he expects a reward for its success (after the game is released and he finds out it's a hit).
Pretty much sums up my thoughts on it too. If your voice sells games then great, you can probably get something like that thrown in there. They fight for residuals now but if they get residuals then their initial pay would probably be lower correct (I really don't know but it's what my gut tells me)?However this is what, the quickest selling game of all time at the moment? So what about all the games that tank? Sure there's some games out there that would make a killing with residuals but I don't think those would beat out the amount of games where a set paycheque allows the voice actors to make a living.
Also $100k over 15 months is about $6700 a month, deal with it. Sure voice acting can be difficult (I couldn't do it) but that seems like a decent wage to me.
These guys work full time for video game companies or movie studios. They work on several games and movies and once and just keep switching.
Actors and voice actors work when there's work, and if they're lucky enough to get hired.
Their unions set up a residual system (well, not voice actors, but that's coming), and labor unions (okay, so programmers don't have one, but after the EA bullshit I could see it down the road) don't.
It's really that simple. In a perfect world everyone who was part of a project would get something off of the profits, but then there would be no profits.
I think someone who can really bring value to a game should be compensated fairly for it. If they are one of a few qualified people for the job, they will be able to demand much more in their contracts. If not, welcome to capitalist society.
Note that I'm not saying GladOS didn't make the game. I'm just saying Ellen McLain didn't make the game. It wouldn't have been hard to have someone else do the same thing, as opposed to the techs and programmers who took years to learn how to do what they do and months/years to make the game work versus a woman who did maybe a week or so of talking into a mike.
Edit: I'd even give Jonathan Coulton more credit, for having the skill to write the song and do the instrumentals. Maybe I'm unjustly looking down on voice actors but I'm not easily impressed by them.
What I really mean is this: she has put something on her resume that will allow her more room to negotiate payment for her next voiceover job. She did an outstanding job in Portal, and not only was she compensated for it, she became very well-known in the video game community, and she's likely to find more work as a result.
It's kind of how careers work, and it's irritating when people don't get that. (That isn't directed at Scooter or Ellen McLain, but rather at people who actually don't get it.)
It also seems to me that the technical side of things can be trained much more easily than someone's voice or acting ability can be trained, because it seems like the latter would need to build off of at least a little bit of natural talent. I would tentatively agree that Coulton's work was more skilled though.
Well, he isn't asking for a million is he? He just wants residual compensation.
What you are failing to see is that after he finishes this job, he might not get work for a few months, whereas all of those programmers still have a steady job of programming the next big thing.
Plus, anyone can be a code monkey. Regardless of what you might think, learning to code is not that hard. Talented actors are far rarer than talented coders.
Pretty much this; cast as an unknown, Al Pacino got $35,000 for "The Godfather" (according to imdb.com). But that was the base for his multimillion dollar career.
As far as residuals go, I'm all for voice-actors getting some kind of system going to get them, as residuals are a pretty important part of that kind of career.
The dude got paid $100,000 for what, a couple weeks, maybe a couple months worth of work? Let's say he spent 3 months of 5 day, 40 hour/weeks worth of recording (which I think is a very generous estimate but I could be wrong), and he didn't do a single thing the other 9 months of the year. The dude still got paid more than the majority of the coders who all worked all 12 months. I would love to not be able to find work for 75% of the time if it meant the other parts of the year I got more than people working 100%.
I'm not going to begrudge the guy his 100k, but he got paid generously imo and asking for more is just greed.