Sounds swank. Maybe you should quit the programming and take up voice acting.
Look, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to want a bonus if the game you worked on sells 2 million units and for that bonus to be bigger than the voice actors residual. But you are annoyed that SAG is only going after their members’ reasonable request and not yours. That isn’t reasonable.
But it’s not $3K. It’s $3K per voice actor. Troy Baker, Ashley Johnson, Merle Dandridge, Annie Wersching, Jeffrey Pierce, W. Earl Brown, Brandon Scott, Nadji Jeter, Nolan North, Yaani King, Hana Hayes, Robin Atkin Downes, Ashley Scott, and Reuben Langdon all provided voices for “The Last of Us.”
14 actors at $3K is $42,000. That’s not “retire to my private island” money for anyone, but it could be a nice pot for coder bonuses.
Now count how many programmers, earning $70k or so, worked on the game and divide $42k between them. I think you’ll find it a rather insulting bonus amount.
https://www.gamefaqs.com/ps3/652686-the-last-of-us/credit
I count 18 programmers, 5 “additional” programmers, 2 lead programmers if we don’t count the game developers, animators and lighting effects guys.
If you ever want to insult me with an extra $1000, you have my permission. In advance.
$1,830 if you split it evenly between everyone with “Programmer” or “Additional Programmer” as their title. So an extra 2.6% bonus.
Blizzard is owned by Activision, fyi.
Regarding the notion that actors who do voice work for games that sell over 2 million units - it should be understood that very few games ever even crack the 1 million mark.
This, for example -
Is a chart showing the performance of games to date in the US (I’m only looking at US, since we’re talking a country were SAG is relevant).
Here’s the top-10 performers of the year so far (and their totals, if applicable):
1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (NS) 1,303,200 to date, 1,303,200 total
2 Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (NS) 754,659 to date, 754,659 total
3 Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4) 721,015 to date, 721,015 total
4 Pokemon Sun/Moon (3DS) 690,665 to date, 5,029,789 total
5 MLB The Show 17 (PS4) 583,941 to date, 583,941 total
6 Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands (PS4) 564,475 to date, 564,475 total
7 Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands (XOne) 505,904 to date, 505,904 total
8 Resident Evil VII: Biohazard (PS4) 501,452 to date, 501,452 total
9 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (WiiU) 494,238 to date, 494,238 total
10 Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (PS4) 472,992 to date 3,730,680 total
Notice that quite a lot of those games might not hit 2 Million even this year.
MLB - sports games are hard to figure, but they tend to sell the most right at the start, because they rely on multiplayer. They may never pass 2M, before next year’s comes out.
Ghost Recon - another series that does most of its sales upfront because multi, is probably nearing its peak.
Breath of the Wild might get there, and Horizon, but it mostly depends on Switch penetration.
Mario Kart and Pokemon will continue to be big sellers, obvs.
Uncharted, one of the biggest series alive, will probably top at 5M. It’s limited to the Playstation, though.
Here’s a different search of the VGChartz database, for games that have sold 2 million world wide
Notice that out of a database of 171,000 games, they only find 873 that sold over 2M globally, and that’s going back decades.
Here’s another cite - Wiki, but useful - of the top 50 best selling games of all time.
Notice that this includes games going all the way back to Duck Hunt and Tetris (still No. 1!)
The only indie games (in the modern sense) on that list are Minecraft by Mojang and Terraria by Re-Logic (neither of which includes celebrity voice actors). The other producers on that list (ignoring companies from the 80’s and 90’s) are:
Nintendo
The Pokemon Company
Blizzard
Activision
Bethesda
Electronic Arts
Sega
Microsoft Studios
Rockstar/Take Two
In short - yeah. All those companies can afford to give residuals to professional voice actors.
Granted that list cuts off before we get into the more interesting borderline cases. But I think it’s clear that by specifying 2 million in sales, actors are aiming for only the top selling commercial hits.
This request for residuals will almost exclusively affect games that are the equivalent of major motion studios blockbusters (and the rare indie mega-success). It will almost exclusively affect games that are being produced by the biggest studios with the biggest wallets. Indie studios or smaller games - who can’t afford SAG actors in the first place - will not be burdened by granting residuals for games that sell 2 Million.
2 million games sold sounds like a lot, but in the game industry, it’s only very top sellers and the biggest studios that will be affected by this on a regular basis.
My buddy working at Apple just got something like $8k mid-year bonus. He was surprised because he thought there was only an end of year bonus.
Including lead programmers, 42,000/25=1680. Since there are certainly guys making over $70k it is less than 2% for sure.
Production companies love residuals. As long as they’re collecting them rather than paying them.
Sure, and we don’t know the exact distribution, etc. But if the argument is that the programmers are “eh” or insulted by an extra $1.6k as a bonus, it’s not a very compelling one.
Do you get bonuses at work? I don’t but friends and my wife do. A bonus that is barely an extra paycheck really isn’t much. And as noted above, this bonus only arrives when you have a major blockbuster game. If that blockbuster you help develop earns you the merest token of a bonus you really should feel a little underappreciated.
If programmers want what SAG members have then they need to band together and fight the toxic libertarianism and machismo that plagues their profession. Start looking out for each other. Stop letting their employers buy their loyalty.
We have an actual game developer in the thread.
Lightnin’, would you be insulted by a $1680 bonus?
And have you worked on a game that sold over 2 million copies?
Just FYI: VGA Charts is incredibly innacurate. I would attempt to use official numbers if they are released, NPD numbers when available, or Steamspy numbers - but they are only accurate when it’s a Steam exclusive.
I somehow doubt that this is how the programmers feel. Or, heck, it doesn’t even have to be a direct cash reward. Maybe put that money towards an extra programmer on a project so the rest can work something closer to a 40-50 hour week. That’s “towards”, yes I know $70k, etc. Point being, I really doubt that the programmers couldn’t find more reward in $42,000 besides “Feh, give your pity pennies to voice actors!”
I completely forgot this strike was still ongoing. Now that I think about it though, I’ve noticed some really bad voice acting in games lately, something I never usually payed much attention to. Mass Effect Andromeda’s was MST3K-level bad. Horizon: ZD seemed to have been voiced entirely by stoned hipsters. Even the new Zelda had some very strange voice acting throughout.
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Let’s not get too ridiculous. No one is turning down free money. My point is that SAG is asking for a pittance from incredibly successful projects. Saying maybe we should instead split that pittance amongst the programmers and game developers is silly because it wouldn’t change the programmers’ financials, job loyalty or workload at all.
How many hours do the voice actors work compared to programmers?
I suspect that the voice actors don’t put in nearly the time the programmers do.
Slee