Bad voice acting has been part of games for so long.
First off, we need to get rid of the Creative VS Technical debate. In gamedev both are equally important and usually dealt with by people who are both creative and technical. That’s the default state.
No, your motion capture performance ain’t shit until someone spends hours cleaning it up and integrating “your animation” in the game engine. Your voice acting performance ain’t shit until someone picks the best take, minimizes your mouth noise, makes it sound like you’re in space and integrates it in game.
Do not create classes. We’re all in this together. Flatten that stupid pyramid, please.
Second, union VS non-union and how game developers to this day don’t have any, like VFX houses. Two factors:
– People are drowning in work and don’t bother dealing with this. We all work insanely hard –we all do but bear with me- at finding solutions to problems that didn’t exist before. People completely forget that: game development really is Research & Development. TV or movie technicians or actors, they swim in a pool of “been there done that”, we are not. Even when things look the same and that we think that we can use an old proven method to do something, it turns out that we still have to write some new code, maybe change an entire wall. It’s fucking nuts, I’m not exaggerating. VFX houses do the same, creating 3D that you have never seen before, dealing with mad constraints etc.
I stand by this distinction: we all work hard in the entertainment industry, but game development is the craziest. Look at cycles: 2, 4, 5+ years of development. Hollywood can churn out a massive Marvel movie employing 1,000 people every 1.5 years. So no time –and by that I mean brain time- for game developers to negotiate and meet with companies which will not help to establish unions, not their interests. Which brings us to the second factor:
– Not enough older people. In TV and movie production in Hollywood where unions are very powerful you see people of all ages, early 20s to late 60s all the time. We all age and we need more security and less snacks, that’s how it is. But the game industry really enjoys people from 20 to 35. Especially before 30. Obviously young people will never care about unions. In TV you’d BETTER have your union card to get good work so when you start, you don’t see it as a thing that drags you down but as an opportunity to be treated fairly (yeah unions bring socialism all over the place, job stability, nice healthcare etc).
That is a weird thing: if game development is so much R&D, why would you not create a pool of veterans and use them to mitigate risks? Because they could unionized and sort of demand stuff? That might be one of the answer. Unions in Hollywood can shut down any production at the blink of an eye, I’m sure most big game companies are not looking forward to that.
But yeah as a veteran game audio designer who can barely use his skills outside game development, I feel so overwhelmed by the work (sound design, implementation, new tech showing up etc) that unions –despite looking good on paper- are so not in my head. To be fair in a game studio with a good reputation, salaries are usually good and relationships are flat enough that there’s no need for unions VS bosses.
I tend to think that’s progress. I wish it was expanding and that game culture wasn’t so stubbornly aimed at the youngest, things would change in developers’ favor more probably.