Sounding off
In $24-billion video-game industry, voice actors struggle to make a living in a demanding craft
LOS ANGELES She woke up with a tickle in her throat. This was worrying for Ashly Burch, who, at 27, is a rising star in the small world of voice actors, best known for her work in video games. She knew actors who had blown out their voices in the studio. She’d come close herself. So leaving her house that morning Burch sipped a soothing mix of chai tea and pea milk. “It’s non-dairy,” she said. “Dairy creates mucus and that’s not a good sound.”
Now, standing inside a soundproof studio in nearby Santa Monica, she gave no hint of discomfort as she prepared to record new lines for Horizon Zero Dawn, one of the year’s most popular new releases.
“How’s your throat?” the director asked.
“Fine,” she said, as a monitor glowed with her lines.
Voice actors are increasingly on the front line of a transformation taking hold in the entertainment industry as the creativity of Hollywood and the technological innovation of Silicon Valley converge. Voice, that intimate marker of human emotion, is now seen as essential to the US$24.5-billion video-game market. And the best voice actors — their names known to fans and promoted by companies — can become celebrities despite never appearing onscreen.
Yet voice actors in this industry are not treated like actors in television and movies. This led voice actors to go on strike last year against 11 of the largest videogame developers over bonus pay and such safety issues as vocal stress. The bitter labour dispute dragged on for 11 months before a tentative deal was reached in late September.
The lengthy strike highlighted how video games have emerged as the scene of a tense clash between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Voice actors want to be treated more like TV and film actors, who are viewed as central to the creative process. Tech firms often see the developers and engineers as the true stars of the show.
“They keep saying, ‘Games are different,’ ” said J.B. Blanc, a wellknown voice actor and director. “But that’s no longer true. Because games want to be movies and movies want to be games. These are basically 100-hour-long movies.”
A couple of days before her Horizon Zero Dawn session, Burch was at the Cartoon Network offices in Burbank to record voices for the new cartoon OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes. Jobs like this helped her and other voice actors stay afloat as the strike dragged on.
Another voice actor on the show, Courtenay Taylor, mentioned she suffered a hemorrhage in her vocal cords last year. Most injuries come from exertion, such as screaming. But she got hurt whispering. She had to visit a speech pathologist for rehab and was unable to work for three months.
Other actors said they’ve tasted blood in their throats during prolonged sessions. One actor fainted after screaming for too long.
The nature of video games makes it difficult work. Many games feature characters dying or crying out in agony. Burch once worked on a military-themed game that required her to shout all of her lines for four hours straight.
During the strike, the union asked for the typical four-hour session to be cut in half for vocally stressful work. But the tentative deal includes only a promise that the companies will work with the union to examine the issue during the three-year contract. Pay was the negotiation’s biggest sticking point. Actors in movies and TV usually earn residuals or bonus payments, typically when their work is re-aired or issued on DVD. And TV actors won improved residual payouts from such streaming companies as Netflix and Amazon.com in the union contract agreed to earlier this year.
But games don’t pay residuals. In video games, actors earn a flat fee.
The union proposed a bonus structure for voice actors that kicked in when games sell at least two million copies — a blockbuster in movie terms. The one-time bonus would have been capped at $3,300.
The tentative contract doesn’t include that. Instead, the game companies agreed to a three per cent raise for the guild’s minimum wage — which works out to about $850 for a four-hour session — and a sliding upfront bonus schedule based on the number of sessions, maxing out at $2,100.
But almost no voice actor can survive on video game work alone. It just doesn’t pay well enough.
In the end, the tentative deal was a major victory for the companies, said David Smith, associate professor of economics at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management.
“The principle of paying union actors residuals is something they are fundamentally against,” Smith said. “I think they see it as a slippery slope. If they give an inch on this concept of royalties, it’s a first step for others to ask for them.”
Those “others” would be game developers — the tech wizards who code endlessly to make the magic happen.