Been still thinking a good deal about the issue of game development, and residual payments. There was a post on wilwheaton.net about it, and though I’d heard it before, the point that actors & developers are on the same side stuck this time. Sort of. The fact that the SAG was pushing only for residuals for their members does turn it somewhat into an us vs. them issue, but at the same time, I can’t really expect the SAG to be looking out for people who aren’ t members (ie: the rest of the game development community).

Still, the notion is sound – the voice actors *are* a part of the game development process, and though they contribute extraordinarily little, in terms of the amount of time they have to devote to a project, the issue is *still* sound. Their payment, obviously, should be proportional to their contribution, but the fact is, the more copies a game I’ve slaved on sells, the more money I should make from it. While EA pays my wage, they continue to profit off catalog sales for *years* after they’ve stopped paying me, no matter how unique/novel my contribution to the development process was.

I’m still not sure where the line is drawn, though – do you pay all engineers for their contributions to things? Does the guy who designed the LED mask that a company uses to churn out a billion LEDs a year get a cut of each one sold? Forever? I suppose that’s how it would be. If done right, you could cut everyone in on part of the profit, and the company would still get its cut, essentially the “work” the company did, as an entity, in producing the product.

I think the reflexive “WTF? Are you fucking kidding me?” response I gave initially wasn’t necessarily the right response – it was a reaction to a presumption that the voice actors felt that they deserve a cut of the profits, and the developers don’t. I understand that the SAG doesn’t give a shit about the fact that the developers are getting screwed, and I understand that they’re only there to look out for their members. It feels shitty, to me, that I’m substantially more powerless, simply because at some point, someone *else* stood up for the actors – that they get to ride on coattails that have already been established, and if I want to try to organize something similar, I will undoubtedly face years of hardship, and likely get drummed out of the industry, were I to become the public face of unionization. Whee.

Then again, there’s probably something to be said for starting your own company that *is* essentially the core of the start of a union itself. That thing is, “It’ll undoubtedly be thankless, crushing responsibility that will destroy you financially,” but there you go.