Acting union SAG-AFTRA has announced that it has come to an agreement with various caompanies across the gaming industry, including Take-Two, Activision, EA, Insomniac, Llama Productions, WB Games, and Blindlight to bring an end to the video game voice actors strike. According to the press release announcing the agreement, members of SAG-AFTRA voted in favour of the agreement by a vote of 95.04 percent to 4.96 percent.
As part of the agreement, SAG-AFTRA members are seeing a general rise in compensation, starting at a rate of 15.17 percent on ratification of the deal, and then going up by an additional 3 percent each year starting from November 2025, until November 2027. The agreement also improves the maximum amount of overtime rate for performers, basing it on double scale.
One of the bigger aspects of the strike was the fact that SAG-AFTRA members wanted to have their jobs protected in an industry that has been seeing the rising use of AI for various creative aspects of development. The new agreement brings in “safety guardrails and gains” around the use of AI, including the requirement for companies to get consent from perfromers, as well as offer disclosure when it comes to these companies wanting to create AI-based digital replicas of the performers.
“I commend the strong leadership of Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Chair Sarah Elmaleh, who remained steadfast through three years of hard bargaining while facing many challenging headwinds during a challenging negotiation cycle,” said SAG-AFTRA president Fran Descher in the press release. “This deal achieves important progress around AI protections, and progress is the name of the game! My sincere respect goes out to the entire video game performer community and their allies for their solidarity during the strike which provided the necessary leverage to secure this deal’s many essential gains.”
“We are pleased that SAG-AFTRA members have ratified a new Interactive Media Agreement, which delivers historic wage increases, industry-leading AI protections, and enhanced health and safety measures for performers,” said a spokesperson for the video game producers that signed the new agreement. “We look forward to building on our industry’s decades-long partnership with the union and continuing to create groundbreaking entertainment experiences for billions of players worldwide.”
For context, the strike had gone on for 11 months. In a statement, the SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, had also thanked the union members as well as allies who had taken part in the strike and helped raise support.
While the strike by SAG-AFTRA was an important one when it came to the union protecting its members against emerging technologies like AI, the strike has also had an adverse affect on the development of games. Hideo Kojima, for instance, had confirmed back in January that the development of both Physint and OD faced setbacks because of the strike, with casting for the former being outright suspended.
Interestingly, of the games in development affected by the strike, Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 6 was made “exempt” from it. A spokesperson for the union confirmed this back in July 2024.
