Francisco Gonzalez’s upcoming point-and-click adventure game Rosewater features an all-star cast of voices, including Greg Chun (Yu Nanba in Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Infinite Wealth, Ike in several Fire Emblem games), Roger Clark (Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2), Cam Clarke (Leonardo in 1987’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Liquid Snake in Metal Gear), Dave Fennoy (Lee in The Walking Dead), Cissy Jones (Katjaa in The Walking Dead, Delilah in Firewatch)… the list goes on.
That sounds like the cast for the latest AAA blockbuster. But it’s not. Gonzalez was able to assemble that cast despite being an indie developer working mostly alone on a game with a budget of under $50,000. How did he do it?
Gonzalez is one of numerous indie developers who have signed a deal with the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) that allows them to use union members in their productions at reduced, indie-friendly rates in exchange for a number of protections for the actors themselves.
The agreement also includes a new provision that governs how studios can use actors’ voices when training AI models. This means that projects signed under this agreement are exempt from the current SAG-AFTRA video game actors’ strike. As a result, projects like Rosewater have access to some of the industry’s most famous actors, while most AAA games do not.
Dreams come true
Gonzalez has been developing games since 2001. Inspired by classic adventure games, many of which were voiced, Gonazalez has often incorporated voice actors into his projects over the years. At first, this meant working with non-union actors, many of whom were working on their first video game projects. Gonzalez says he had good experiences with all of these actors, and many of them went on to join SAG-ATRA. But recently he’s felt drawn to supporting union work.
At first, Gonzalez didn’t think he could make Rosewater a union project. He did the math on his previous game, Lamplight City, which had 70 speaking roles, around 8,000 lines of dialogue, a cast of 19 actors, and 30 two-hour voiceover sessions. Knowing what he’d spent on Lamplight City, Gonzalez was able to estimate that Rosewater would cost about twice as much. It had more dialogue, and although the union base wages were reasonable, he saw no way to finance a game on his small budget, given studio rental costs, pension and health insurance contributions, and workers’ compensation.
But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and every single voice actor started recording in home studios. While some actors had already been doing this before the pandemic, suddenly every single actor Gonzalez could have wanted had a setup at home, making studio rental and other additional expenses unnecessary. As a result, he was able to go back to his publisher and ask for a slight increase in his acting budget, thus affording to turn Rosewater into a fully union-played game under SAG-AFTRA’s Low Budget Interactive Agreement.
“I guess the idea that to join a union you have to deal with mountains of paperwork, there’s all this crazy stuff, you have to deal with agents and it’s super complicated,” he says. “There’s some truth to that, but it’s actually a lot simpler than I thought.”
As part of his new agreement with SAG-AFTRA, Gonzalez set about hiring voice actors for Rosewater. He put together a fantasy cast list based on actors whose work he knew and loved from other narrative games. Of the 22 people on the list, he expected maybe four or five would say yes. But every single one agreed. “I was over the moon.”
It seems #VoiceActor is trending, so here’s your regular reminder that the cast of my upcoming adventure game ROSEWATER is absolutely packed! pic.twitter.com/julx33cN7d
— Francisco Gonzalez (@GrundislavGames) 16 April 2024
One of those actors was Cam Clarke, who voiced Leonardo in the ’80s cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Gonzalez grew up watching the show and was a huge fan of Clarke, so it goes without saying that he was thrilled when Clarke accepted the role “within five minutes.”
“I think a lot of smaller developers have that fear too, thinking, ‘Oh, my project isn’t good enough’ or ‘It’s not notable enough for big name actors to work on it,’ but that’s really not the case,” says Gonzalez. “Most voice actors and most unionized voice actors are just working actors who want to work. They’re not necessarily going to turn something down just because it’s on a smaller budget. The whole point of the union setting those rates is because they themselves have set a rate internally that they think is reasonable and fair.”
Sarah Elmaleh, a member of the SAG-AFTRA IMA negotiating committee and an actress in numerous plays, including Rosewater, agrees.
“In general, we all just like working – we like working with people who are willing to meet our basic fair demands for pay and protection, and we like working with people who are excited to work with us,” she says. “Because that’s where I started my career, I always knew there was a world of diverse, enriching, personal stories and experiences in smaller game projects. I’m definitely not the only actress who has had a lot of fun on bigger games and also actively seeks out smaller ones to find creative fulfillment and variety. I think that’s more and more true every day as we see more generations of game performers playing games who grew up playing games, like I did.”
Many actors
Recently, SAG-AFTRA announced that the video game actors would go on strike. After 18 months from Fights In order to reach a new contract with gaming companies, the two sides are at an impasse on (actually) a major issue: the protection of AI. In fact, the actors are demanding that all video game actors: face, movement and voice be properly protected to ensure that their performances are not used to create or train digital replicas of themselves without information, consent and appropriate compensation. And they are willing not to offer their services to video game companies until this demand is met.
But this strike doesn’t extend to all video game companies. There are a few exceptions, including studios that signed a tentative AI agreement that essentially agrees to the protections the actors are fighting for anyway. Gonzalez is one of the developers who signed the agreement. Although filming had already wrapped by the time the strike occurred, the actors are allowed to continue promoting Rosewater during the strike. And the terms were easy for him to sign: He doesn’t want to use AI in his games anyway.
“At least in terms of dubbing and creating digital replicas, I think it’s just lazy and it steals the work from the actors,” he says. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to just say, ‘I need someone to pick up this line,’ rather than going through the trouble of creating a complete digital replica, only to have it spit out a line because it didn’t say something the way you expected. Plus, it just doesn’t sound right. I’ve heard some digital replicas and they still sound wrong. You can’t get that nuance from a machine.
“I’m sure that at some point technology will be so advanced that it will be much more difficult. But why bother? Let’s just use voice actors. There are enough of them.”
In addition to the tentative agreement, Gonzalez also signed the new “tiered” agreement for low-budget games, which provides different pay levels for unionized actors depending on the budget of the game being worked on. As Elmaleh explains to me, the latest agreement is “a total revamp of the original low-budget agreement we did years ago, with more tiers for more budgets.” In addition, she says SAG-AFTRA is “also offering revised guides for those who have never managed a SAG-AFTRA contract before, as well as lots of open outreach and messaging to bring people in.”
“I have done this personally for many years, and now the staff and committee are fully behind this effort,” she adds.
Gonzalez, at least, needs no further convincing. He’s already committed to using union labor on his next game, and recommends the arrangement to other indie developers. Gonzalez tells me that in the long term he’d like to work on an arrangement that would allow indie developers to run pickup sessions at a pro-rated rate, but otherwise he’s quite happy with the terms.
“I will support the union 100% in the future, as far as I can and as far as I can afford it,” he says.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter at IGN. Have a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
