Posted October 14, 2015
With regards to the voice actors, the general discussion here has been great. It would seem to me that their union is functioning more like a guild than a union. Games are made better by good voice acting. If good voice actors want a share of the profits of a game (i.e. royalties), they should negotiate a lower up front payment (like Alec Guiness did with Star Wars) or as someone above suggested offer the additional service of promotion with bonuses tide to hitting sales numbers. In that last case, they really are joining the company as a contractor on the marketing team.
There are several examples of other performance artists that get paid for the first performance only. Consider the studio musicians that record the backing tracks for "solo" vocalists. The little guitar lick in that Katy Perry song that makes a hook that someone sings was played by someone who got paid for a day of work in the studio, but the royalties for the song go only singer, the composer of the song, and sometimes the producer. Is this wrong? That guitarist worked under an agreement (contract) and was paid. The fact that the song made several people millions of dollars later doesn't give that musician the right to retroactively demand more money.
