The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) has backed out of the proposed contract that would give its members working on videogame projects a 36% raise over three years. With 1,900 members affected by the proposed contract, SAG said it would like to “explore other options.” Most of its members want to hold out until there are residual payments and profit sharing in the deal.

The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) accepted the contract, so the new deal will take effect July 1st.

Normally, I would say that SAG is a greedy bunch of bastards (which they are); but, SAG has a good idea: residual payments and profit sharing for those who actually bring you the game.

Voice actors are such a ridiculously small part of the game, it’s not even funny, yet they get the majority of the money. It’s high time the artists, level designers, and programmers got together and forced a union on their own, because they’re the ones that deserve residual payments and profit sharing more so than the actors that gets paid overtime for working 8 hours.

Sadly, the voice actors (who only put in a 4 hour “day”), will continue to get the majority of the money, while the code monkeys, testers, level designers, and a myriad of other people (who put in long sleepless nights just to make sure an interim build goes smoothly) will continue to get shafted.

Provided by Geekstreak