![]() He believes that this is mostly due to the fact that, unlike in film, video game companies don't deal with actors sometimes until years after development has started. "I think they just don't know," he said, explaining that these publishers and developers don't understand what it's like to work with actors. have told us in negotiations that we don't matter.įreeman told us frequently in our interview that, during negotiations, publishers said voice actors didn't matter, but despite the way they've been treated, he doesn't think that most of these companies are "bad"-even the ones he disagrees with. According to the union, all games from these companies that went into production after February 17, 2015, are covered by the strike. "The sad part is that the very performers who these Companies value-and who are impacted by the union decision to strike-never got a chance to vote on the companies' proposal," Witlin said. And they don't want to give that up because they're making a lot of money, and they don't want anyone to impact their bottom line on that."Īs for the publishers, chief negotiator Scott Witlin said in October that the companies "did everything in their power to reach agreement with union leaders, offering a money package almost identical to SAG-AFTRA's last demand." Witlin also added at the time that the strike has "little to no immediate impact on the ability of fans to buy and play the video games they love as the majority of upcoming games already are in production." "And they're deathly afraid of that because they want to be able to exploit actors, they want to be able to exploit developers. ![]() "I just feel it's time for the video game industry to put on its big boy pants and act like a proper entertainment company," the voice actor said. According to him, SAG-AFTRA is just looking for "parity between the video game contract" and all of the others. While SAG-AFTRA is demanding certain things, Freeman says all of their proposals "exist in every other contract" that they, as actors, work under. I don't know anyone who would go to work not knowing what they're working on, and yet we're asked to do this continuously." Freeman as Firefly in Batman: Arkham Knight But when you decide you want to hire an actor, and you call up their agent and say, 'We want you for this game,' you have to tell them what the game is. ![]() During auditions, keep it all codenames and top secret. "I understand the video game industry is very secretive, and so we told them it doesn't have to be during auditions. It's a common drone with a lot of video game stuff." "I've been asked to work on games without them saying that it's the same game again, and so they tried to undercut my salaries. "I've been asked to work on games without knowing what the game was and then shown up and been told that I'm going to have to use the N word repeatedly as my character with no warning ahead of time," he said. One of the big things Freeman pointed out was that publishers would often not tell him what game he had been hired for, making it difficult to know the context of his role and whether he was being paid fairly for his work. "Because right now they treat us like we don't matter," he said. When asked what the most ideal outcome of this strike would be, Freeman's answer was simple: that voice actors are ensured safety, respect, "a tiny bit of shared prosperity," and that they and their contributions are treated as something valuable. It was the last thing we wanted to do, but they left us with no choice." "It's the longest negotiation SAG-AFTRA has ever done. "We negotiated with them for 19 months in good faith," Freeman said. GameSpot got the opportunity to talk to Overwatch voice actor Crispin Freeman about the strike, and he's unsurprisingly disappointed that it's gotten to this point with the other publishers. Blizzard, however, is not one of the companies that SAG-AFTRA is striking. Video game mocap and voice actors who are a part of the SAG-AFTRA union are currently in the middle of a strike, after almost two years of negotiating with some of the biggest publishers such as Activision, EA, and Take-Two ( see the full list here).
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