Sure they are, however if you come to the conclusion (if you decided to read the article) that voice actors being told with no preparation that they were going to be performing scenes involving SA are whiny babies you’ll be told you’re not being nice which is what we expect on our instance
Just in case you skip to the comments: the complaint is that actors are not being told anything about what game they are working on or what kind of scenes they will be doing. Then, they show up to the studio and they are asked to do explicit sex scenes or sexual assault scenes day-of with little warning or time to consider whether they are comfortable with that.
What a shitty title to the article. It should be "Actors demand action over unanticipated video game sex (and rape) scenes". Especially if the actor may be a rape survivor, asking them to act that out without any warning is idiotic at best and harmful at worst.
There are absolutely actors who are down to do that stuff but you can’t hire people with a script sight-unseen and just drop stuff on them that might straight up give some people a panic attack to even think about, let alone re-enact.
Title makes you think there are actors who don’t want games in general to contain explicit adult content, but this is 100% reasonable, and yet another reason voice actors and game industry workers need to unionize.
I bet your ass the same shit is happening with asset creators and animators.
I think they actually are unionized. At least in the UK. That’s what some of the Baldur’s Gate 3 actors said when asked about the anti AI strikes. They can’t participate because of the rules of their union.
If I recall correctly there is even a sentence in the article about the British union starting to tackle this issue.
In some countries, some people, in some parts of the industry, are unionized. It’s not even close to being the norm. It’s only slowly starting to happen.
There’s a lot of straight up porn games out there so who knows what kind of shit these actors end up in when they show up for a generic “motion/voice capture for video game” gig.
And on the other side we have the Baldur’s Gate actors praising Larian for hiring intimacy coordinators and not requiring themselves to mocap the sex scenes.
Edit: Ah, just saw that this is addressed at the end of the article.
Yes, quite. I’m a regular practitioner of touch-stimulated emotional relief aided by intimacy content distributors on the digital nexus of information.
Actor here. Doing intimacy scenes is surprisingly difficult, arguably more so than combat, because usually people train and get certified in sword and dagger, rapier, firearms etc to get cast
When working a job, putting your mouth on another person’s mouth is a very unusual act, and you want your actors - regardless of gender - to feel safe, comfortable, professional and not exploited - not to mention you might spend 2x 14 hours days on this sequence from multiple angles getting it the same every time
And also largely nonsensical in how they occur and are written. It’s so boring. I mean I would love an actual intimate relationship to contact such a broken world but the devs of course won’t let me, instead I get fanfic writing.
I have no idea what game has a realistic rape scene in it. All I could find for her credits in video games was this:
– Unknown9: Awakening (Video Game)/ Casting Director – full performance capture cast & all additional voices./ Dir. Damien Goodwin.
– Peaky Blinders (VR video game)/ Casting Director – full performance capture cast. / Dir. Kate Saxon.
– Warhammer 40K: Battlesisters (VR video game) / Casting Director – full performance capture cast. /Dir. James Horn.
– The Witcher Series 2 (TV) / Casting Associate for VFX & SFX with Sophie Holland Casting.
– Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (video game) / Casting Director – motion capture cast. /Rocksteady Games.
– Little Hope (video game) / Casting Director – motion capture cast. / Dir. Nick Bowen.
Her credits are not where a game she wasn’t in would be listed, smartass. That’s just the list I was able to find of her work. People like you are so eager to prove everyone wrong on the Internet that you can’t use your brain.
Sometimes I forget how unprofessional the game industry still is or how little respect people have for well being of others. I’d like to say I’m surprised but that would require having some expectations towards those companies.
I hope more VAs speak up about stuff like this so we can have some real changes.
I’d say that isn’t the game industry, but it’s basically every company and employer everywhere. Nobody matters. Nobody is important. We’re all expendable seems to be the world.
The issue is much bigger than this and much bigger than valve.
The underlying problem are nation state sized companies that are so vertically integrated that they profit from every step of the process they are involved in.
Through their huge size they have the power to profit on procurement, labor, production, sales, etc. compared to smaller companies. The concept of billion dollar companies (and individuals) is perverse.
The capitalist system was not designed to harbour companies that never make a loss and are sold or broken up just because they dont satisfy last quarter‘s predictions.
Everywhere where joe or jane average cant start a competing business (either through overzealous regulations like tiny banks or through monopoly inducing IP laws like the one allowing valve to infinitely hold games hostage) you will have overcharging, barely any progress in development and small numbers of people ridicolously raking in profits.
We need to get rid of the right to „sell“ limited licenses, billion dollar companies and shareholder primacy.
It says Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.
Ms Shotbolt says this has enabled Steam to charge an “excessive commission of up to 30%”, making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.
This is actually the norm on a lot of platforms unfortunately. Apple. Google Play. Not at all unique to Valve.
Just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s not excessive. In contrast, Apple’s implementation of a 30% cut is even worse, since with an iPhone you can’t just install an app from another source (and even when you can in the case of the EU, there are recurring costs for doing so). Since Steam accounts for the majority of PC video game sales, with AAA titles only not releasing on it when they have a clear financial motive not to, Valve’s use of a price parity clause effectively makes it the arbiter of what the industry standard markup on PC should be.
That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.
It also sounds like Valve’s price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.
As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don’t know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data’s integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.
As I mentioned in another thread, if their running costs were close to the revenues they make then their owner wouldn’t be a multiple yachts owning billionaire.
Their cut is a %, which means that as games become more expensive they make more money. But their running costs actually go down as they improve their tech and code.
An internal memo was made public and they make more revenue per employee than Microsoft.
We’re overpaying for games but people just got used to it.
Forcing you to sell at the same price as on steam when customers will be downloading from steam servers anyway is not sketchy but very fair.
As a developer you could set the game price on steam to a high number and sell keys on your own site for cheaper. Anyone who buys a key then used steam resources to download it. The dev keeps the 30% since its not a sale through steam. Yeah id like free file hosting with terabytes of bandwidth too please.
If you sell the game yourself and provide the files, you can set lower prices. This is fair and valve doesn’t restrict that.
There was a indie dev, the Spiderweb games guy, who refused to use Steam for years and he sold his games on his website. I think it was from like 2008 all the way to 2022. Refused to give Valve a cut.
Then he finally released it on Steam and he wrote a blog post how his niche games sold extremely well and regrets leaving so much money on the table for years.
I’m fairly certain that applies to keys a dev requests be generated, so that any Steam keys can’t be sold elsewhere for cheaper than they are on Steam itself. Games that are sold on multiple platforms including Steam can absolutely be sold at different prices. I know, because I’ve bought games elsewhere because they were cheaper than on Steam at the time due to sales.
The lawsuit doesn’t imply that Steam forces their piece to always be cheaper than the competition. Sales can happen on different stores at different times, thus a game can be $50 on Steam and $40 on Epic today.
But Steam forces sellers to offer “the same offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time” - source (sorry, Shitter link) from this article, which is about a similar lawsuit from 2021.
And the language used means that, while this only applies to devs who make use of Steam keys, it doesn’t apply to the Steam keys themselves - if you want to use Steam keys, you also can’t offer discounts on competing storefronts. From the source:
Rosen said he ran into that issue when he decided to release Overgrowth at a lower price on other storefronts in order to take advantage of their lower commission rates. “When I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM,” Rosen wrote.
bbc.com
Aktywne