Sad to say, but the union probably won’t get many meaningful concessions from this one. The technologies to fully generate model movement (motion capture) and emotive voice (voice acting) are already reasonably mature and constantly improving.
The artists will (rightfully) get strong control over their own likenesses, but if they think they’re going to stop mass adoption of AI in video games they’re dreaming.
Don’t underestimate the power of celebrity actors in games in terms of sales. There are people who buy games specifically because certain actors are in them.
That’s true, and there are people who go see movies specifically because of whom appears in them. But I’d hesitate to call that the majority, especially in gaming. The set of people that play games and the set of people who follow the industry are certainly overlapping, but are far from identical.
I think this is pretty much the perfect time to be doing this.
Plenty of actors and actresses do motion cap, or even full FMV acting, for a lot of smaller tier games. And plenty of major games outright market themselves on getting “real actors” involved. Remember how Patrick Stewart was in 30 seconds of Oblivion and Sean Bean was in five minutes? And not to mention the likelihood that GTA6 is publicly revealing fairly soon.
And looking forward: Anime games continue to be a thing and… that is an ongoing area of concern where the american VAs are openly acknowledging they are afraid to even SAY “union”. And while dubs are very much a third class citizen as far as studios are concerned, they are still a lucrative one and a lot of the major VAs have branched out enough that this could be an issue.
As for “AI”: All signs point toward The Law being about training data. In part because that maps best to the existing structures (if you steal a clip of a movie and don’t credit it, you get DMCA’d) and is something that benefits the actual major studios. With most of the SAG negotiations being about a performer/creator’s rights to their own media. The outcome will almost definitely end up being “all previous content is off limits for training. An actor or a writer can ‘agree’ to having their performance be added to a training database X years from now”.
But in games? Kojima is infamous for just making Snake look like (and be named after…) Kurt Russel’s performance in Escape from New York. And plenty of versions of Lara Croft and the like have looked eerily similar to some actresses. Same with studios over the years accidentally openly acknowledging that they are using episodes of Days of Our Lives or whatever as motion cap to model face emotion and the like. Hell, how many thirsty bois were wondering who the face model of the new soldier lady Jane in FF7-R was?
Right now, that is a wild west. But if that gets your studio put on the shitlist then it starts being a real issue. Especially with the ongoing acquisitions (even if we are in a lull). Get caught training your AI off of Anna Kendrick’s performance in 50/50? Your studio has now become radioactive.
So this is slightly misleading. The board approved a strike authorization vote which will run from 9/5 to 9/25. If the impacted members authorize a strike the negotiation team will have that as leverage day one of contact negotiations.
I agree. Once I realized the distinction, tho, I’m still happy. Having the authorization in hand when negotiating, especially after taking into account the current double strike, will presumably give them more leverage than ever. I’m cool not having any new media for a couple years if it saves the industry.
Not even to mention the Star Wars games, any Marvel games, the new indie game, the Avatar game from Ubi. They might not have any active in-house studios but they are quite active in giving the rights to studios for their franchises.
“Co-op was the most requested feature and we had it in our prior games, but we decided screw you, we arent going to put in couch co-op. We’ll make up something about tension being lost, and how it’s not a party game. Oh, but we’ll still have online co-op where the tension will be there because you are sitting alone from each other I guess.”
I may be going crazy, but wasn’t this game in development hell by another company, then changed companies mid-development and has stayed in dev-hell since?
Yeah, it was almost close to release and apparently it was a tire fire. Who knows how much of the original they kept. I really hope it’s good, the first bloodlines was a blast if you ignored or modded out the bugs.
A Starfield player has credited the sci-fi game with saving their life after they stayed up late to play it and was awake when their apartment complex caught fire.
u/Tidyckilla took to Starfield’s subreddit over the weekend to report their amazing escape, saying that if they hadn’t been awake “bingeing” the game when the fire broke out, the player and their wife would likely have “died to smoke inhalation”.
eurogamer.net
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