Video game actors to go on strike over AI

Industry rep "disappointed," says agreement reached on 24 of 25 issues.

SAG-AFTRA image for the actors’ strike, via the union’s website.

Video game voice and performance actors will go on strike a minute after midnight (Pacific) tonight, citing an impasse after 21 months of negotiations between the SAG-AFTRA union and major western video game companies, for a new deal.

The sticking point, it seems, is generative AI and concerns that it can be trained to create synthetic voices that would cost actors’ jobs.

“We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse A.I. to the detriment of our members,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said in a statement.

“Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live—and work—with, we will be here, ready to negotiate.”

The union has been negotiating for over a year with a collection of the biggest game companies, including Take Two Interactive (Grand Theft Auto), Insomniac Games (Spider-Man), Electronic Arts (Iron Man, Star Wars), Activision (Call of Duty) and widely-used voice acting studio Formosa Interactive (Death Stranding, Destiny 2, Helldivers, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and more).

“We are disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal, and we remain prepared to resume negotiations,” Audrey Cooling, a rep for the game production companies said in an emailed statement.

“We have already found common ground on 24 out of 25 proposals, including historic wage increases and additional safety provisions. Our offer is directly responsive to SAG-AFTRA’s concerns and extends meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers working under the [Interactive Media Agreement]. These terms are among the strongest in the entertainment industry.”

But SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said the companies are falling short of providing “fair compensation and the right of informed consent for the A.I. use of their faces, voices, and bodies.”

While most work involved in video game development historically hasn’t been covered by union protections, acting for video games has. It’s therefore subject to labor deals.

Actors in the U.S. who provide their voice and/or physical performance to games involving the world’s biggest game publishers do so through SAG-AFTRA’s Interactive Media Agreement. The most recent one, which does not include AI protections, expired in November 2022, though both sides had agreed to work with the existing one during talks over a new deal.

Actors’ growing AI fears

Actors have been worrying about the risks AI poses to their jobs for some time. Last year, I reported for Axios about the concerns of Victoria Atkin, a veteran actor who was horrified to see a fan-made mod use the voice she performed for an Assassin’s Creed game applied to the script for the role-playing game Skyrim.

“If my voice is able to be taken and manipulated from these franchises, and people can make them say whatever they want to say, that’s very frightening … for myself and my livelihood,” she said.

Those percolating fears have also involved what game companies could do with AI that can mimic an actor’s voice or create a new one. The AI anxiety propelled a warning shot fired by SAG-AFTRA last September, when union members voted to allow negotiators to call for a possible strike.

At the time, Cooling responded saying that sides had “reached tentative agreements on over half of the proposals.”

But the AI issue has lingered and SAG-AFTRA said today they needed to strike. It’s a publicity-maximizing moment for the union, which has a game actors’ panel at the San Diego Comic-Con tomorrow.

Impact of a strike

An actors’ or writers’ strike in TV or movies can halt all productions. A game actors’ strike has less obvious effects. Most of the labor involved in making games isn’t impacted and can continue, but the recording of verbal or physical performance—and the ability for an actor to promote their work in a game—is frozen. That can slow development and maybe result in delays.

Games that have budgets between $250,000 and $30 million can proceed if the studios behind them use SAG-AFTRA’s tiered agreements for smaller video game projects.

Projects larger than that—meaning any game that’s considered AAA—are impacted by the strike unless the productions are proceeding proceed under the union’s interim terms. Those terms mandate consent and compensation for the creation and use of “digital replicas” of the actors.

Game actors last went on strike from late 2016 through late 2017, pushing for better pay and protections for their health. Impacts of the strike were largely hidden from the public, though actor Ashly Burch said she was unable to reprise her role in the popular series Life is Strange due to the work stoppage (Burch will be on the panel tomorrow in San Diego).

In 2005, actors and game studios forged a last minute deal on the eve of a strike authorization vote.

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Item 2: Hasbro is a gaming company

Hasbro is redefining itself as a “games, IP and toys” company, CEO Chris Cocks told investors today, a shift from just calling itself a “toy company.” 

The maker of Monopoly and Transformers has big ambitions for digital/video games, including $125 million in capital expenditures a year on video games, with plans to ship 1-2 new titles annually as soon as late 2025, Cocks said today.

Hasbro’s strategy involves a mix of developing its own games, publishing others and scoring lucrative licensing deals, across some 150 or so projects.

Regarding that last category, Hasbro today reported earning $45 million in licensing revenue from the Scopely-developed mobile hit Monopoly Go in the first six months of the year. It expects another $60 million from the game in the latter half of the year.

“Games like Baldur’s Gate III show us what the future looks like,” Cocks added, referring to Larian Studios’ 2023 blockbuster that used Hasbro’s Dungeons & Dragons license. 

Flashback: Hasbro told Game File about its video game ambitions in March.

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Item 3: In brief…

👀 A must-read Bloomberg expose about pedophiles who prey on kids in Roblox underscores a challenge with the popular child-focused platform: “You can’t ask for real names, email addresses or phone numbers at sign-up. This protects the privacy of children—but also of predators.”

• Roblox, expecting the story, played defense with an article of its own touting its “multi-prong and interconnected approach to safety.”

☹️ Humble Games, publisher of acclaimed games such as Signalis, Unpacking and last week’s Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus, has conducted mass layoffs, calling it a “restructuring” rather than a shutdown (a description disputed by laid off workers). Publishing of any currently-signed projects has been moved to an outside firm.

• Humble is owned by Ziff Davis, which also owns IGN and the Humble Bundle charity group.

🚫 A man who sent death threats that led to the postponement of Nintendo events in Japan has been sentenced to a year in prison, IGN reports. 

😲 Over 500 workers at Microsoft-owned Blizzard are forming a union through the Communication Workers of America. Like the Bethesda union announced last Friday, it is “wall-to-wall.” In this case, a Microsoft rep told Game File, that means it includes “all regular full-time and regular part-time Blizzard World of Warcraft development, administrative, and quality assurance employees employed by Activision Blizzard in the United States.”

💰 EA has backtracked on one recent controversial revision to its Apex Legends battle pass, as it will resume letting players unlock the game’s premium rewards track using in-game currency that they can earn by playing the game.

• Earlier this month, EA said it would be removing that option, forcing all players to pay for the battle pass with real money.  

📱 Epic is pulling Fortnite from the Samsung Galaxy app store, “in protest of Samsung's anticompetitive decision to block side-loading by default on Samsung Android devices,” per an announcement today by the company (no word yet on what will become of some Samsung Galaxy-themed Fortnite skins).

• The company is proceeding with plans to launch an Epic Games Store for mobile apps on Apple iOS (in Europe) and Google Android (worldwide), as it continues to spar with the world’s top phone makers over what it argues are anti-competitive practices.

• Fortnite was booted off the iOS and Android stores in 2020 after Epic introduced alternate payment options in Fortnite that circumvented fees paid to Apple and Google.

🚙 The addition of Tesla’s Cybertruck to Fortnite is not sitting well with some players and even some of the game’s developers, PC Gamer reports. 

🎮 Microsoft has added last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III to the Console, PC and Ultimate versions of Game Pass.

📱 Genshin Impact maker MiHoYo’s next big game appears to be called Astaweave Haven and just might be a life-sim management game, Pocket Gamer reports.

🇺🇦 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, a game being partially developed in a warzone by Ukraine-based GSC Game World, has been delayed from early September to November 20, the studio said today.

❓ Mario + Rabbids creative director David Soliani, the face of Nintendo and Ubisoft’s cross-franchise collaboration, is leaving Ubisoft after a 25-year run, “to embark on a new adventure.”

❗️ A new crate is causing some drama among players of Counter-Strike 2, Kotaku reports.

🇬🇧 Fallout London, a fan-made PC mod of Fallout 4 that has some 200 quests across 15 boroughs launches today. 

• Eurogamer explains the hoops PC players will need to navigate to access it.