It amounts to the same thing, though. Whether you got a few months pay to carry you through or not you still lost your income, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever find a job that matches it in pay, benefits, etc.
Generally when companies like this are bought it isn’t to acquire the talent. That’s legitimately what needs to be taken into account when it comes to things like antitrust. You want to buy out this company, are you buying it because you want their talent to join with yours to make something better? Cool. We’ll let you do that provided you do it today fair and competitive manner.
Any other reason for wanting to buy this company is going to need to be pretty heavily scrutinized.
The technology was created to replace voice actors. That’s the actual purpose. Its very existence hurts their profession and benefits studios. You can not be a studio, use this technology, and claim to care about ethics, anymore than Amazon can claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.
No one is holding a gun to their head forcing them to us AI. They made a choice. There is no “ethical” way to cripple the livelihood of working class people for the benefit of your business. Just stop using the word.
It doesn’t matter if you compensate or get their approval, because the fact is the existence of the technology in the industry effectively compels all voice actors to agree to let it use their voice, or they can’t get work. It becomes a false choice.
If there was no financial benefit, if it truly made no difference in how much a studio pays in labor or the amount the artists make, there would be no reason for studios to want to use it.
I honestly don’t get why people are so obsessed with proving that they are morally correct in piracy.
Like, does it genuinely bother you to think that people out there are looking down on you for this? Is it really upsetting if somebody tells you you’re wrong and for doing it? Why do you feel like you have to prove something to them?
Just do what you’re going to do.
The world is absolute shit, every single one of us is getting poorer and poorer everyday despite making more money, the economy thrives while we get price gouged for everything including basic necessities like homes and healthcare, and we’re all going to spend the rest of our lives in a world actually on fire because some boardrooms wouldn’t let us stop it. I’ve long since stopped feeling guilty for wanting access to some free media.
No, that’s not a justification. The point is there are so many more important matters to be stressed about than whether or not some people don’t like that I pirate things.
That’s just being intellectually dishonest in the opposite direction.
The truth is some things do get worse, some things get better, and in either case, the right thing to do is examine the tangible effects, positive or negative.
And this has to be on a per-game basis, to. Studios licensing a voice in perpetuity will eventually come back to the same issues.
For AI to truly be a net benefit to our society, it should be used as a tool by the artists to augment the output from the artists. It shouldn’t be a way of replacing them.
If a voice actors job goes from recording each and every line to recording samples for AI and helping to tweak the output, that’s fine. But the compensation stays the same.
That’s how it improves our world. Makes the human’s job easier without replacing them or affecting their compensation.
The way it’s currently on track to be used is how it improves the lives of the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else. No amount of futurist techno-jerking should distract from that. These are not tools for us to benefit from in any significant sense.
You just unlocked some memories. My dad used to play this all the time when we got our first PC. I was too young and wasn’t interested in it then, but damn if you haven’t piqued my interest in digging it up.
Netflix at least didn’t plan to be what it became from the start, they even experimented with releasing some of its originals on Blu-ray for a bit. But when every shitty heavy hitter in the entertainment industry comes after you, you’re gonna learn to be shitty real fast.
Microsoft is a whole different brand of monster. They have a long, long history of terrible anti-competitve practices, fucking over their own consumers, flagrantly ignoring complaints, and making deeply underhanded moves. In many different markets, for decades. The Xbox One release was almost literally a thesis statement. They could not possibly have broadcast any clearer who the fuck they are and what the goal is.
And still, still, people defend them. They downplay everything and fall head over heels for their marketing bullshit.
That’s why we’re truly fucked without regulations. It’s not just because corporations are terrible and will do incredibly underhanded shit at the drop of a hat to raise profits, it’s also because the vast majority of the consumer base is fucking stupid. Incapable of pattern recognition and imagination, and unwilling to change their patterns even slightly. It’s really, really, really easy to see the negative effects of a Microsoft dominated gaming market. And the consumers can’t see it.
Also, the thing they’re spending money on is the hard work of other companies, not Google’s. The profit margins are not tied directly to a Google product; the Play Store generates very little of its revenue in-and-of-itself (Play Pass is the only thing I can think of).
The Play Store certainly isn’t cheap to maintain but it pales in comparison to the amount developers collectively have to spend to create/maintain their apps. The Play Store’s profit margin is obviously going to be high, because Google doesn’t have to spend much to get a cut of the revenue from other companies that have spent quite a lot.
And that’s sort of to be expected with any digital store front that manages in app payments. The question is how much of that profit goes back into the Play Store, or Android development, or into other Google products, and how much does Google eat into the profit margins of those other companies while preventing them from managing payments themselves.