Either everyone needs to get royalties or nobody does.
Pay your voice actors right the first time instead of paying them shit per line. Or if your video game becomes an astounding success, all 1,000 people get a slice of that 100,000,000 million it made in sales via residuals. A cool $100,000 for everyone!
Don’t forget to advocate for yourself even if you have a union. Nobody ever gets paid more by saying nothing.
The coders have their copyrighted works replicated infinitely without royalties as well.
What makes a voice actor’s contributions more meaningful than that? Especially since they can get a half decent voice performance out of any coder and the right generative software which already exists.
Yeah perpetual royalties are a nonsense slippery slope. People are pushing for it in all the wrong ways wanting a piece of the pie from the higher ups when in reality the way the money flows just needs to be altered.
Bridge and road crews don’t get to get a penny every time someone drives over stuff.
Creation does not mean benefit in perpetuity. It means you created something. You should be paid properly for it, yes, but it doesn’t mean every time someone mentions your book you get a penny from them lol.
Melancholy Elephants was a great Hugo Award short story about this very thing written in 1983. It’s a great read for those who want to go in a bit blind. http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
Creation does not mean benefit in perpetuity. It means you created something. You should be paid properly for it, yes, but it doesn’t mean every time someone mentions your book you get a penny from them lol.
Frankly, this is what people in this thread are missing. I’d argue profits are reserved for those who dedicated themselves to making the game. Putting heart and soul into it. Sometimes that can be a VA but most of the time those VAs are like “Listen, we got a week to do this within budget and I AM NOT doing any more than that!”
It’s absolutely fine to draw that line but it’s not fine to then expect profits for doing just the minimum to get the job done. You’ll see a lot of studios just go get non-unionized VAs. People trying to break into the games industry as VAs are a dime a dozen and so any attempt at getting profits as a whole is going to fail.
I think that the main problem is that companies keep getting revenue even if actors don’t. Book writers don’t stop earning money just because they wrote their book 5 years ago, and yes, they don’t win money for reselling, but companies like Amazon and their editorials will keep earning money because of their work, so why shouldn’t the writers earn money?
If your work isnt being streamed or sold, well, you won’t see much. But still, you signed a contract, like the old perpetual pensions.
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Either everyone needs to get royalties or nobody does.
Pay your voice actors right the first time instead of paying them shit per line. Or if your video game becomes an astounding success, all 1,000 people get a slice of that 100,000,000 million it made in sales via residuals. A cool $100,000 for everyone!
Don’t forget to advocate for yourself even if you have a union. Nobody ever gets paid more by saying nothing.
Absolutely agree. Otherwise giving someone royalties is a spit on the face of everyone else on the team.
Be careful, Disney might like that idea
Great. Their CEO can make $2,000,000 / year and the rest $100,000 capping their maximum pay at 20x their lowest paid employee.
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/
The coders have their copyrighted works replicated infinitely without royalties as well.
What makes a voice actor’s contributions more meaningful than that? Especially since they can get a half decent voice performance out of any coder and the right generative software which already exists.
Yeah perpetual royalties are a nonsense slippery slope. People are pushing for it in all the wrong ways wanting a piece of the pie from the higher ups when in reality the way the money flows just needs to be altered.
Bridge and road crews don’t get to get a penny every time someone drives over stuff.
Creation does not mean benefit in perpetuity. It means you created something. You should be paid properly for it, yes, but it doesn’t mean every time someone mentions your book you get a penny from them lol.
Melancholy Elephants was a great Hugo Award short story about this very thing written in 1983. It’s a great read for those who want to go in a bit blind. http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
How the hell do you spoiler tag on Kbin? lol
Frankly, this is what people in this thread are missing. I’d argue profits are reserved for those who dedicated themselves to making the game. Putting heart and soul into it. Sometimes that can be a VA but most of the time those VAs are like “Listen, we got a week to do this within budget and I AM NOT doing any more than that!”
It’s absolutely fine to draw that line but it’s not fine to then expect profits for doing just the minimum to get the job done. You’ll see a lot of studios just go get non-unionized VAs. People trying to break into the games industry as VAs are a dime a dozen and so any attempt at getting profits as a whole is going to fail.
I think that the main problem is that companies keep getting revenue even if actors don’t. Book writers don’t stop earning money just because they wrote their book 5 years ago, and yes, they don’t win money for reselling, but companies like Amazon and their editorials will keep earning money because of their work, so why shouldn’t the writers earn money?
If your work isnt being streamed or sold, well, you won’t see much. But still, you signed a contract, like the old perpetual pensions.