Many of us made a sigh of relief when the Hollywood strikes finally ended last November, but the gamers in us were worried. SAG-AFTRA was still negotiating new contracts for the video game industry, and didn’t exactly seem close to an agreement. Things haven’t changed much since then, so Ben writing that actors were preparing to strike again back in March wasn’t surprising…which brings us to today.
SAG-AFTRA confirms that its union members are going on strike today after more than a year and a half of negotiations. They highlight that progress has been made, but several video game companies and their performance production divisions continue to fight the actors’ demands about protection against the use and abuse of artificial intelligence.
Last year’s film and TV strikes made it clear that this is an area the companies are ready to argue hard and long about, so it’ll be interesting to see how long the video game strike will last when the use of AI has increased a lot lately and many higher-ups continue to tell investors that it’s the future.
It’s worth noting that we’ll probably not see the consequences of this strike for a while, as games launching the in the near future have finished their performance capture and voice recordings. We might see it in a couple of years or so, however, as the game companies could be “forced” to either pause development or use actors that aren’t in SAG-AFTRA. Either way, this will definitely be a decisive moment for AI in video games.
Do you think games will become worse if actors are replaced by artificial intelligence?