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.
One qol improvement I’d like to see is faster team roster selection. Like every time you leave camp, you should get to select which companions will go with you (similar to many other CRPGs). Right now I find myself not using certain companions as often, mostly because I don’t want to go run around my camp for a minute rearranging my squad. It should be a simple drag and drop interface.
If you buy 10 you’ll save even more. It’s like getting your steam deck for free! Hah, valve must be stupid or something, they’re giving steam decks away!
In this case, it’s because it’s a reboot. Calling MW (2019) “MW4” would’ve been arguably more confusing because the new and old games are completely unrelated to each other. Totally different stories, part of a single timeline built off of the Black Ops universe, and a reset of fan favorite characters that have been brought back. There are already a surprising amount of people who don’t understand that, I’ve seen people shocked to find out it’s not just a prequel and that new Ghost is likely to stay alive permanently for those big bucks.
Besides, it’s not like the numbers used to properly correlate, either. Despite Doom 64, there aren’t 63 other Doom games, and Doom 3 is a Doom (1993) prequel. That kind of craziness happened way before DOOM (2016).
I think one of the reasons people don't understand that is because they've pulled the same trick multiple times with far less logical reasoning, so they've kinda done that to themselves.
I still technically am an insider of Behind Good and Evil 2, but I haven’t heard a single bloody thing for YEARS. 10 by now, I think.
This is the first time I’ve heard anything about the franchise and it’s not even from an insider email… Or even remotely related to the prequel that was supposedly well into its development.
When I was invited to be part of the insider program there was a special insider forum and I was given two surveys to do. This was all within the first few months of the invites going out.
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