For someone that’s unfamiliar with this, what WAS the voice actor strike of 2017?

the-archlich:

daolunofshiji:

It was related to voice actors not typically receiving royalties from games from what I hear.

Royalties were a part of it, but just one piece. Half of their demands are about safety.

• Vocally Stressful Sessions. Sessions that involve a lot of screaming, yelling, etc. can be dangerous. Plenty of voice actors will give you stories about times they passed out, lost their voices, damaged their throats, etc. But if actors refuse these sessions, they’re usually hit with a loss of pay or outright fired. The union wants these sessions to be limited to a maximum of 2 hours at a time.
• Stunt coordinators. Voice actors are often pressed into doing some stunt work (in order to capture more realistic vocals). But unlike in film and TV, video games don’t have any sort of safety requirements. Actors want studios to provide professional coordinators to make sure that these stunts are safe. (This would also result in a better performance.)
• Transparency. It may surprise you to know this, but many voice actors aren’t actually told what they’re signing up for. Sometimes it’s just details that are kept from them; sometimes they don’t even know what the game is. (The main antagonist in Fallout 4, for example, was never told that he was making a Fallout game.) There’s absolutely no reason for this. Actors already sign NDAs preventing them from divulging any information, so there’s nothing to be lost by telling them what they’re working on. As it is, actors (and their agents) are often going into projects blind.
• Royalties. Of course actors want royalties, too. Actors in film and TV get them, after all. Currently, voice actors are paid exactly once, at a flat rate. The union is asking for a small bonus for every 2 million units sold, capped at 8 million units (four payments). Any game successful enough to sell 2 million units would certainly be able to support this financially, and games that didn’t sell that many wouldn’t be impacted by this request.

All of this is very reasonable. It’s mostly stuff that’s already standard in other industries. The first two are safety concerns – particularly the vocal stress, since an actor who damages his voice is out of work.