In 2018, freelance voice actor Karina entered a recording booth in London to perform lines for a blockbuster video game. With several male developers watching, she was asked to record a sex scene on the spot.
“I felt so vulnerable. This was a massive game developer. I had no line manager to talk to, it is hard to speak up,” she said.
Karina — not her real name — said if she had known about the scene in advance she would have requested a closed set, where she could perform comfortably.
Her experience is one of many others that led performing artists’ union Equity to draft new rules, following years of negotiations with gaming studios, that set a professional standard for voice actors who perform in games.
The proposal, the first of its kind in the UK, includes commitments to inform actors in advance about the nature of the game they are in, any sensitive content and the type of character they are playing.
When a game is produced, developers hire studios to recruit voice actors who perform the script and often play multiple characters within a game. This can involve over 100 hours of dialogue.
Voice actors involved in drafting the proposal said they were uncomfortable with being asked to play characters of a different race than their own, with stereotypical accents and with religious slurs.
Actors also said they were asked to wear heavy weights to create the sound of being strained while shouting for hours on end with no break, or asked to shout while gargling with water to portray being electrocuted.
“If you lose your voice, you can’t continue to perform,” said Trevor White, an actor who helped to negotiate the agreement. “You can do permanent damage.”
Any potential harm to actors’ voices must be identified by studios and actors should be given a break for at least five minutes an hour, the agreement states. Studios should also try to keep vocal stress to “a maximum of two hours a day”.
Hourly rates for actors are also defined, depending on the size of the studio. For a standard game with a minimum budget of £5m, artists should be paid a minimum of £600 for their first hour and £300 per hour thereafter.
The document also includes rates for overtime, late fees for payments and an endeavour to include actors in credits.
This agreement brings the UK in line with arrangements for voice actors in the US, who went on strike over conditions and pay until a similar agreement was reached in 2017.
OMUK, which has worked on Horizon Zero Dawn and Game of Thrones, is the first studio to join the agreement, which will run until 2023 when fees will be reviewed in line with inflation.
Equity said other studios were interested in signing up next year. Side UK and Liquid Violet, leading London studios that have worked on Assassin’s Creed and World of Warcraft, welcomed the agreement but said more consultation was needed on fees and factors such as payment for trailers and promotional content.
Laurence Bouvard, chair of Equity’s Screen and New Media Committee and an actor who has worked on titles such as The Witcher, said pay had varied “wildly” in the past as the industry grew rapidly with no guidance in place.
“The industry is constantly evolving and companies are constantly popping up. Studios want to know the rules as they need to budget for it,” she said.
UK consumer spending on gaming reached a record £7bn in 2020, up nearly 30 per cent from the year before and rising by more than £1bn since 2018, according to analysis by Ukie, the UK’s games industry body.
As new gaming publishers flooded the space over the past few years, the industry became more competitive, with some studios cutting rates for actors and trying to attract top-tier publishers by offering the lowest package for voice services, said Mark Estdale, voice director and managing director of OMUK.
“Actors became pawns in the bidding game,” he added. “You found that this competition on price was becoming part of the culture.”
