LOS ANGELES (AP) — Striking actors have voted to expand their walkout to include the lucrative video game market, a step that could put new pressure on Hollywood studios to make a deal with the performers who provide voices and stunts for games.
Thing is… video games don’t really “need” actors. At least not in the same level as they need writers.
Sure, some games might want to add realistic expressions and maybe even voice acting, but it’s not something really required for most forms of video game entertainment. Even story-heavy games do perfectly fine with just good writing. In fact, for RPG universes meant to be extensible / moddable, it makes a lot more sense to not be restricted by how many lines of dialogue can the game afford to voice. Morrowind has a lot more dialog options than Oblivion and extensibility / flexibility in how the users interact with NPCs, despite Oblivion having superior AI and a lot more budget.In fact, a lot of the videogames that do make use of voice acting, only do so for one (or at most, a few) languages… meaning that there’s always some subset of players that don’t really understand anything the voices say and still enjoy the game. They might as well be speaking autogenerated gibberish, like Animal Crossing characters do.
Add to that how nowadays 3D animators have a good dataset of information to tap into for creating convincing expressions, plus how AI can be very good at generating decent voice lines… and it gets even harder for a walkout like this to have any success. At least when it comes to the video game market.
