"I feel like we weaponize social media and algorithms to do that, because I think we're still seen as outsources for a lot of the time"
  • ClathrateG [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    30·
    3 days ago

    I mean obviously they deserve to be treated with respect and have good working conditions and pay, but its not surprising that Devs care less about the people they meet a few times (relatively briefly) over however many recording session they have(I know some studios have longer back-and-forth processes with them than others) than the other devs they work alongside daily for potentially years

  • carpoftruth [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    27·
    3 days ago

    Supergiant is better about this, their voice actors are staff positions rather than contract. That’s part of why there is such extensive voiceover and story content in Hades, and why they’ve kept adding more

  • grandepequeno [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    19·
    3 days ago

    (I’m going to be completely honest and say something to vent while not reading the article. Feel free to reply why I should feel different or if you get what I’m saying)

    That’s completely fine. I don’t like celebrities, I’m not sure how much VAs are paid but some times when I hear game VAs vocalize their complaints it reads like concern for not getting celebrity status attached to voicing in video games and not being overpayed to hell like movie actors are. I’m sure they put it in a lot of work, but game dev salaries aren’t all that high compared to standard software developers, and they get crunched to shit too. If voice actors are already being paid fairly, which is an assumption I’m making, I’d much rather the overwhelming profits from video games first to go into getting more devs on board so they can avoid crunch-time and still get the game out.

    Also, subjectively I don’t really care that a person sounds like a video game character I like, because 100% of the time I’m more attached to the character in its universe as a written character than their voice, so I haven’t really gotten into any of the meming VAs do with their characters, because to me that’s not the character that’s just a their voice, even though I do have VAs whose voice I recognized and enjoy seeing show up

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    These are interesting points. If we look how anime does things differently, the voice actors are used at the very forefront of marketing, they do promo before the shows come out, they are the biggest face of the show. The studios use them for marketing far better than developers use voice actors.

    The only situation where I’ve seen voice actors used this way in gaming was back when GTAV released and Rockstar leaned very heavily into Steven Ogg as marketing, he was everywhere. I don’t know how much of that was him or Rockstar though. And to be fair they were marketing the biggest game ever at the time so money was probably being thrown around a lot more compared to smaller titles.