Tag: Video Games

Editorial: Stop Preordering Things


Since some of you are going to get about three sentences into this article before saying “but that doesn’t apply to me,” I’m going to say this from the start: If this article doesn’t apply to you, I’m not referring to you. Thank you.

This week’s nontroversy stars Square Enix, Lara Croft, and once again the Steam review system. I hesitated to even write anything about this the other day because the mainstream gaming media loves taking any shot at Steam that it can, especially when it comes to reviews. If you don’t know why, Valve has made an enemy of the gaming press because 1.) the refund policy has made life a lot harder for their indie developer roommates pushing out low quality experimental garbage, 2.) Valve refuses to pull the rug out just because a few members of the press find its content triggering, and 3.) posting outrage bait doesn’t get nearly enough advertising dollars these days because the people who read said articles out of disagreement mostly use ad blocker and archive.is, and per-click advertising has lost a lot of its value.

Now let’s talk about you, the customer. If I was a Youtuber, this is the part where I’d tell you to stop complaining and how you have no right to be angry if you pre-ordered. Frankly I’m not in the business of telling people what they should or should not be angry about.

Is it valid/justified to be angry that Square Enix dramatically reduced the price of a AAA, full priced game and its DLC after a single month? Before much of the DLC even released? Sure. Are you justified in leaving a negative review solely for the complaint of bad business practices? Of course. Is it Valve’s prerogative to flag or remove the reviews as abusive? Nah. Are you overreacting if you pledge to boycott Square’s games forever? No judgement here. So what’s the catch, I can hear you wondering. Here’s my take.

Certain gamers need to stop acting like the industry has your best interest in mind. They don’t, they truly don’t. They care enough to the extent that they think the profits of their action/inaction outweigh the costs, and will say virtually anything to the extent that the law allows in order to keep your cash flowing. In some cases, they’ll actually go far over that line with the knowledge that the chances of punishment for said statements are pretty low.

I’m not ignorant, either. It’s completely understandable that a company is going to put a product on sale if it isn’t selling well, and apparently Shadow of the Tomb Raider isn’t selling well. Square Enix doesn’t have a legal obligation to burn potential profits because they don’t want early adopters to feel scorned. They do however have an actual legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders, and I’m not being hyperbolic. It’s an actual legal obligation that they can be taken to court for not fulfilling. If people getting burned is the cost of recovering some of the title’s massive budget, well that’s a problem that will be dealt with.

So with that in mind, let me be the ten millionth person to suggest that you stop preordering video games if this is going to be a major problem for you. I’m not going to make a blanket statement that nobody should preorder ever. If you’re one of the people who buy games day one, or preorder them, and you’re familiar with the developer, you like the franchise, and the game is worth $60 or whatever you pay for the special edition and you’re pretty confident that the game isn’t going to be trash and are willing to forego reviews to play early, then you’re golden. You got your money’s worth, even if other people paid less a month down the line.

The value of luxury goods like video games is 100% subjective, you pay because you think it’s going to be worth it. If you don’t, you wait. In America, this is how our commerce works. If I think the Camaro is worth $25, I’ll probably never own a Camaro. On the other hand, if you say “$25? That’s a deal” and sell yours to me, the courts generally won’t side with you if you decide you want the car back because the value of a trade is up to the parties involved.

Great thing about games is that if you have a bit of patience, you can save a hell of a lot money. Games go on sale, especially on PC, at massive discounts several times a year as Steam has taken every opportunity to have the kind of discounts that you normally only see when the company is going bankrupt and liquidating assets. I especially point this out in the case of paid betas, and that most people shouldn’t take part. Why pay money for exclusive access to a buggier version of what you’ll have to start from scratch anyway, for a game that in the case of what we cover here at MMO Fallout is probably going to be free to play? Again, if you’re into that, cool. Otherwise, why bother?

And always presume that when a PR person is making promises, they’re probably lying or at the very least talking about things that they have no real confidence in. I’ve talked about this before, but I can’t stress how many times we here at MMO Fallout have noted developers outright lying in the past decade. Think about how many times we’ve been lied to over pretty drastic things. Our game isn’t going free to play. Our game isn’t shutting down. We’ll never include a cash shop. Our cash shop is only cosmetic. We’ll never sell boosts. Those boosts will never be overpowered. Our cash shop will never sell armor. Our cash shop will never sell the best armor. Our cash shop will never sell armor better than what is in game. We have no intention of selling our business to a higher publisher. We have complete creative control over our content. Nobody is being laid off.

Games are a service and a product, and that means if you’re going to jump on board you really need to know what you’re getting into. Online components for games will eventually die out and shut down, whether it be the developer pulling the plug or simply that nobody plays it anymore. Games fail, it sucks when it’s something you’re really into. I know this, I have a physical library of MMOs that I bought over the past two decades that have shut down for various reasons. Products go on discount, and most retailers for the purpose of keeping your patronage will let you get the discount if you purchased the item a week or two beforehand.

That said, when you bought the game at its full price, you did so because you thought it was worth that cost. Would you have not bought it knowing that the price would be 50% off a month later? Hindsight is 20/20, but expect it. You should be doing this for every product you buy, because anything could go on clearance the next week. If that makes it not worth buying, don’t buy it. You probably don’t need it right now.

I worked at Gamestop for a few years and nothing kills me more than the pre-Black Friday crowd. I actually had a gentleman come through one year and buy an Xbox One and Gears of War 4 at full price on November 23. November 23, two days before Black Friday. I told him this is going to be on sale in two days, you can get a special edition of the console plus the game for $249, that’s $100 off what you’re paying now. Don’t want to come into the store? Buy it online, it’ll be there. He said no, I want to buy this today, so I sold it to him with no protest. Here’s the kicker, he showed up on Saturday to complain about how he felt ripped off buying the console right before the sale. Tough shit, by the way we’re out of that version now.

In conclusion, an exercise of self control is a blessing. You’ll come out a much more satisfied consumer and less vindictive person overall.

Other than that I have no opinion on the matter.

[Not Massive] Germany Allows Swastikas In Games/Depictions of Hitler


Depicting Nazi imagery in video games has been illegal in Germany for quite some time now. The law has come under a fair amount of criticism over the years as while it has a “social adequacy” rule that has allowed films and TV series to get by (Inglorious Bastards for example), video games have not been subject to the same treatment. Developers responded to these rules often going down humorous routes such as Soldier of Fortune 2’s storyline being rewritten to replace Nazis with robots that take over the world and then start imitating human life (a prequel to Job Simulator to be sure), and The Last Crusade showing a world where Adolph Hitler leads the Black Square regime

Well it looks like the times they are a’changing, and Germany will be allowing on a case-by-case review the approval and age-rating of games depicting Nazi imagery such as the Swastika and Iron Cross, as well as the character of Adolph Hitler. According to Games Wirtschaft, the catalyst for this change was the 2017 release of Wolfenstein 2, where in order to skirt German regulations, developer MachineGames removing Hitler’s mustache and having him referenced in the game as the Chancellor.

It should be noted that this is not a blanket approval of Nazi imagery, and that games will still have to be approved to ensure that they are within existing German law.

(Source: Games Wirtschaft)

Chaturday: Have You Thanked Your Local National Supreme Court Today?


Given the recent climate in and around the gaming industry, the average gamer can’t really be faulted for being at least a little afraid of the path that our beloved medium is heading down, one that millions of you have turned into an industry larger than television and film.

After all, certain forces have seemingly catapulted their efforts to demonize violent video games, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, and the White House and President himself have invited those very people to hammer down on their propaganda. People like Dave Grossman, who famously referred to violent games as “murder simulators,” would be pushing his unsupported views on a president whose own quotes seem to imply a rather lackadaisical view on the whole matter:

“It’s so incredible. I see it. I get to see things that you would be — you’d be amazed at. I have a young — very young son who — I look at some of the things he’s watching, and I say, ‘How is that possible?’ And this is what kids are watching.”

We shouldn’t be scared, and I can sum up why with one Supreme Court ruling with one majority opinion written by one Justice Antonin Scalia.

One constant throughout the industry is that retail stores do not sell (to the best of their ability) mature games to underage customers, but the reason why isn’t as clearly understood. Ask around and you’re bound to hear answers from both customers and retail workers that the reason is because it’s illegal, others point to store policy. The latter are correct.

There are no laws on the books in the United States that criminalize the sale of mature rated games to underage customers and if there are, they’ve gone unnoticed due to not being enforced, and if they’ve been enforced they’ve been overturned. Of all the things I talk about being without precedent, this is definitely not one of them.

And you can thank Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator Leland Yee for this ruling, because in 2005 the California State Legislature passed a law that banned the sale of violent games to anyone under 18 and imposed a fine of up to $1,000 for each violation. Senator Yee sponsored the bill and Governor Schwarzenegger signed it. A strong proponent of regulating video games, Lee was later arrested in 2014 and convicted of felony racketeering, money laundering, public corruption, after he was caught buying firearms from Philippine terrorists and attempted to sell them to an undercover FBI agent.

Representatives of the industry including the Entertainment Software Association were successful in suing the bill before it went into effect, with California appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court, only to have the court find the act unconstitutional as it compelled speech that was not factual (the law required violent games to affix a warning to each box). The law was appealed again and went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the law was unconstitutional and violated the first and fourteenth amendments. Majority opinion was written by Justice Scalia who noted the lack of compelling evidence linking video games and violent behavior, the successful self-regulation implemented via the ESRB, and the notion that violent games were entitled to just as much protection as violent cartoons like Looney Tunes.

So if you’re afraid of a looming war against games, don’t be. The organizations that fought against the bill in California and the nearly dozen other states where similar laws cropped up are still around, the ESA wouldn’t let such legislation go without a fight, and we have the Supreme Court on our side ruling that any such legislation would be unconstitutional.

Other than that, I have no opinion on the matter.

Game Software/Hardware To Hit $165 Billion In 2018


It’s no surprise that the gaming industry brings in quite a bit of moolah each year, a number that has been increasing for years and doesn’t show much of a sign of slowing down. Analyst Digi-Capital today released a prediction that video game hardware/software could reach $165+ billion in sales and go as high as $235 billion by 2022 if it stays on course. By comparison, according to the firm, this kind of revenue will make the gaming industry bigger in the next five years than the GDP of 150 countries.

You can read the whole report at the link below. The gaming industry has also been fueled by record investment, over $2 billion in 2017 and growing.

(Source: Digi-Capital)

[Community] How Gazillion Entertainment Can Salvage Itself Post-Marvel


Marvel Heroes is dead, and potentially so it Gazillion Entertainment assuming they don’t have the resources to get another game up and running before they declare bankruptcy. With Marvel’s ARPG gone and another game possibly coming down the line, I want to put my money where my mouth is and offer up a few tips for Gazillion on how to interact in this post-Heroes world.

1. Fire Your CEO, David Dorhmann

Before Gazillion Entertainment can do anything, they need to fire or somehow oust current CEO David Dorhmann. Let’s be honest: Your community, what few return after you took console player’s money and skedaddled barely six months later, despise your CEO and view him as one of the major reasons that the game many spent years and hundreds if not thousands of dollars on is shutting down, outside of you evidently not being able to comprehend a contract. Judging by Glassdoor reviews, your employees hate him just as well, and even David Brevik can barely contain his ability to not call the guy a sleazy, womanizing predator.

His reputation for inappropriate conduct, especially towards women, is something that “industry insiders” are aware of talk about behind closed doors. His conduct has been tolerated because he often controls the money flow and is a good talker. This is a problem at some tech companies and needs to be addressed much more assertively.

All that the public needed to know about Dorhmann’s character, we learned during a livestream where he berated a female employee. It doesn’t matter if either he or the employee tried to brush it off as “just a joke,” we all saw how it went down. Do yourself a favor and boot him out, because I’m willing to bet that if Disney won’t do business with you in part because of your CEO’s shennanigans, neither will most other licenses.

2. Don’t Replace Marvel Heroes With Original Character The Game

Over at the Marvel Heroes forums and Reddit pages, I’ve seen a lot of posts from people hoping that Gazillion would take the existing Marvel Heroes framework and simply remove everything that was Marvel related and replace it with something else. Just like how Gazillion stripped the game of everything Fantastic Four related when Marvel pulled that license. This is not a good idea.

The thing that made Marvel Heroes great was the fact that you could play as Marvel’s characters and not just that but collect a wide variety of cool looking costumes from the comics and movies to boot. I can’t help but feel that a re-skinned Marvel Heroes would fall flat on its face as you would lose the iconic characters who would inevitably be replaced with generic Roboman, Gooman, and more. In addition the Marvel license helped, but not really since the game was quickly losing players, cover up the fact that parts of the game were just a mess. PvP was a dumpster fire, Gazillion wouldn’t recognize a deadline if it beat them over the head with a brick, and the end-game was in a state of limbo for a real long time.

In order for the resurrected corpse of Marvel Heroes to have any chance at success, Gazillion would need to replace the license with another license. Why not DC Comics? How about Dark Horse comics and their various IPs? Or Valiant Comics? There is a treasure trove of non-Marvel heroes to collect from Valiant once you fire your CEO and get to work salvaging your business.

3. Be Less Generous

In the business world, there is generosity and then there is plain recklessness. Gazillion on the PC side of Marvel Heroes was just plain reckless, and basically gave away the house leaving not a whole lot left for players to really indulge in when it came to real money purchases. It’s rather humorous because Marvel Heroes launched with such a stingy system that Gazillion tried so hard to reverse that they basically swung the pendulum in the completely opposite direction, going from giving nothing away to giving everything away.

I don’t feel like this is a controversial statement, and most long-term Marvel Heroes players would agree with me. I’ve put in hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars into this game, and I absolutely stand by the fact that Gazillion gave too much away for free and the company’s revenues suffered for it. Unfortunately by the time Gazillion was done kissing everyone’s feet to make up for how greedily they acted when the game launched, it was too late to go back and reduce those giveaways because it would push too many people away. The experience rates, boosts, speed of character acquisition, the costume blender: All great ideas if you want people’s good will, but good will doesn’t pay the bills.

4. Recognize Those Who Brought You Here

This one is going to be a bit more obscure. Whatever Gazillion does with their next game, assuming one exists, you have to give something to the people who stuck with you this long. Nothing overly grand, just don’t forget that this whole ordeal with Marvel Heroes is your fault, not the customers, and you owe something big to the people who continued pumping money into a project that you inevitably blew for one reason or another. The supporting customers are why you’re here today, and if your next project is hoping to bring them back, you need to show them more recognition than “thanks for all the fish.”

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Blizzard Again Promises Tough Punishment For Overwatch Trolls


If you could formulate a plan to effectively punish, and get rid of, toxic players in your community, you might just become the richest person in the gaming industry. Until then, we’ll need to sit back and watch as developers continue to commit to punishing toxic community members and hope that everything works out for the best.

For Blizzard, the ongoing discussion of toxicity has come back up after director Jeff Kaplan posted on the official forums regarding an account that had miraculously accrued more than two thousand complaints, been silenced for more than a year’s worth of time, and has been suspended three times.

"That account has a total of 2247 complaints filed against it — making it one of the worst offending accounts we’ve seen. The account has also been silenced for a total of 9216 hours. There are 3 gameplay suspensions on the account as well as 7 silences against this account (these are for abusive chat and/or spam). There is also a manual GM account suspension for "massive griefing" levied."

Blizzard’s plans to alleviate grief include removing silencing altogether and utilizing suspensions/bans more. For competitive, Kaplan stated that the company is in the process of handing out bans/suspensions for players who boosted in Season 5 of competitive mode, also adding that players will be permanently banned from competitive if they are found to be abusing it repeatedly.

"We will do this as it is our responsibility but we’d like to spend more time rewarding good players rather than having to focus on poor sportsmanship and unacceptable bad behavior so much. Like it or not, this is an "us, the OW community problem" and not just an "OW team problem". For better or for worse, we’re in this together."

Long term plans involve promoting positive behavior. Toxic behavior is a problem that MMO Fallout has reported endlessly on, with various developers flexing their muscles and threatening harsher punishments and longer bans. For developers, especially those with large competitive communities, the fight against toxicity is a constant uphill battle.

Good Reads: 12 Surprising Health Benefits of Video Games


Good Reads is a new column I’ve been thinking about starting for a while now to bring attention to some other pieces I’ve found on the web that I think are worth my audience’s attention. This week’s bit was sent to me by a reader and is a list of how gaming can actually promote healthy habits. Naturally this isn’t the case for everyone, but I do have to agree on the points of creativity, stress management, and multi-tasking, among other points.

Let’s first consider the benefit of taking our mind off things. We become so engrossed in the games that we forget about the reasons for the stress. If you struggle on a night with stress and poor sleep, you could find that a bit of video gaming helps. It will help you unwind from a long day, and you focus purely on the missions in front of you.

The title sounds pretty clickbaity, but it is an interesting read. As someone who has had some bad issues with stress management in the past, I can personally relate to a few of the points on this list.

Link: Positive Health Wellness

Leslie Benzies Announces New Game Studio


Leslie Benzies, former Rockstar North President, has announced development on a next generation game utilizing Amazon’s Lumberyard, based on the CryEngine and integrated with Amazon’s web services, including Gamelift and Twitch. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland and Los Angeles, the group is in the process of building new game design and development studios.

“I am proud to have been part of past advancements in gaming,” says Benzies, “but I am even more excited about what we have in store for the future. The working title of this new game is EVERYWHERE” and the vision is long term, with the capacity to develop and grow forever. Our goal is to create a platform where players can be entertained, and also entertain others while blurring the lines between reality, and a simulated world.”

Everywhere has an official website up at the following link. More information sure to follow about upcoming projects.

2016 In Review: The Year’s Most Unexpected Events


I can’t always predict the future. No, it’s true, and I am willing to admit what may just be the only flaw in an otherwise perfect being. I’m just that humble. So yea, 2016 brought with it some big surprises, and you won’t believe #6 (because this list only goes up to 5). What happened in 2016 that you didn’t expect? Let me know how you saw it coming in the comments below.

1. Wildstar’s Continued Existence

This one surprised me more than anything, and while the legion of doomsayers run around the net every year calling for the impending deaths of World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and every other game under the sun, this one had good reason behind it. NCSoft is not known for its kindness and understanding when it comes to under-performing titles, and I have made a few attempts to explain why Wildstar is in a bit of a different situation.

If you look back at the titles that NCSoft has shut down, they mostly all share one common bond: Money, not the individual game’s money but NCSoft’s money. These cuts came at a time when NCSoft was doing poorly overall as a company and needed to shed some of its liabilities, which meant losing their games/subsidiaries that were struggling or failing to make a profit. It happened to Lineage, Tabula Rasa, Exteel, City of Heroes, etc. In the case of City of Heroes, we learned that while the game itself was profitable, Paragon Studios was not.

So Wildstar survived 2016 against all odds and despite the fact that free to play and Steam just gave a momentary boost to their revenue. At this point, Wildstar is living on borrowed time. While I won’t outright claim its sunsetting in 2017, I will say that should NCSoft hit some financial trouble again this year, Wildstar will be the first thing scuttled to save the ship.

2. Daybreak Game Company and Turbine Entertainment

If Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online become part of Daybreak’s all access program, you can just hook that IV of nutrition right into my arm and funnel my checks straight to whoever is in John Smedley’s old office, right next to all the stuff that Columbus Nova has pawned off to save a buck, because I am never leaving the house. I’ve said a few times that my dream is that other multi-game publishers take a note from SOE and have an all access pass, and you know what? They don’t.

Turbine is moving away from gaming and going into the mobile app pseudo-games, a world where mediocrity isn’t just rewarded, it pays enough to afford Super Bowl advertising money. I think most of us expected that Turbine would spin off the two MMO teams into their own company, although it was likely more blind prayer that they wouldn’t just shut the whole division down and shutter everything, but who could have seen Daybreak Game Company coming? The company whose name is synonymous with slowly carving up the remains of Sony Online Entertainment like it was a delicious honey baked ham.

The plus side is that Daybreak doesn’t own Standing Stone Games, so this agreement likely won’t see much (if any) in the way of holiday layoffs. But seriously, Daybreak, that All Access. Get on it.

3. Korea Makes Cheat Development a Criminal Offense

This could only happen in a country where eSports is as big as it is in Korea, and I’m not talking about North Korea where Kim Jong Un most recently not only took all three top spots in the World Overwatch League, but also managed to pull in Most Handsome/Intelligent Gamer. This is South Korea, where pro gamers are treated like gods, where your account is associated with your social security number, and where there is a ton of money to be made in cheating.

Creating cheats in South Korea is now punishable by up to $43 thousand in fines or a maximum of five years in jail. You have to assume that the punishment will fit the crime, and that most cheat makers will be handed a hefty fine based on whatever profit they were bringing in. It seems highly unlikely that anyone will face an actual jail sentence of more than a week or so, unless the penal system is exceptionally harsh in Korea.

No, not that Korea. You don’t even want to know what happens if you’re caught aimbotting against Lil Kim.

4. Digital Homicide’s Existence

What can I say about Digital Homicide that hasn’t already been said about Milli Vanilli? It had fifteen seconds of fame and now nobody cares. The only time you hear them being brought up is when someone says “hey, remember Digital Homicide? I may be living in squalor but at least I’m not that guy,” and everyone goes back to eating their KFC (Nashville Hot now in stores, big thanks to KFC for being smart enough not to sponsor this article).

From the outset, Digital Homicide seemed to be like every other mediocre indie developer, a fragile ego hastily compiling the kind of shoddy work that you normally make before you start showing your work to the public, and not only showing it to the public but placing it for sale. Their existence had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Steam’s Greenlight program was broken and not serving its function, a mountain of garbage built by the ultimate garbageman himself, James Romine (or Romaine if you read my earliest pieces).

But not content with merely saturating the store with heaps upon heaps of copy and pasted assets, Romine took the meta one step further by launching an active lawsuit against a Youtuber for criticizing his games. The lawsuit went nowhere and is currently in limbo waiting for dismissal by the judge, but not before pulling the ultimate bastard move: Serving Valve with a subpoena for the identity of 100 users in the hopes of finding out their identities. Finally deciding that they had had enough, Valve dropped the hammer and cut its ties completely with Digital Homicide, destroying the company financially and sending Digital Homicide back into the depths from which it had surfaced.

5. SAG Goes On Strike, People Stop Paying Attention

You could virtually count in seconds how long it took for the Screen Actors Guild to go on strike and for the public/press to stop taking notice. I find the whole ordeal laughable, not because I am anti-union or disagree with what the strike is demanding, but because the games industry overall is a pretty despicable place to work in and, if I had to offer advice to the folks currently on strike, it’d be to take a nice safe paycheck in the growing animated/CG film industry. This isn’t the part where I say “the industry is sleazy, deal with it or leave.”

If you take the time to actually read the demands of the SAG union, they’re pretty tame. A bonus for every 2 million copies sold or 2 million subscribers up to a maximum of 8 million, aka four payments. They want standard safety equipment/people on set to prevent unnecessary injuries, reduced hours, and an updated contract that was written in 1994 when video games were about as serious a product as Big Bird’s Speak and Spell, except less valuable as a market commodity.

The reason I say that the strike makes me laugh is because, at the end of the day, this industry can be pretty horrible. We’re talking about companies that, with little or no shame, pull tactics like $10 online passes to harass the second-hand market, where Microsoft was willing to risk shooting its platform in the head with the initial (revoked) decision to restrict used games, cut out entire parts of the world by launching an online-only console and simply refusing service to countries because they didn’t feel like it, where Capcom demands you pay more money to unlock content already installed on the disc, where companies shamelessly announce that selling you more DLC is a higher priority than actually fixing their product. And let’s not go into how poorly game developers can be treated, this isn’t a contest to see who is more abused.

So I can’t say I have too much confidence that the bean counters in the industry will take the strike seriously, you can tell them that even though they’ll save money by hiring scab actors that the quality will likely drop, all they’ll hear is that they’re saving money. While there are countless numbers of passionate people who love their work on all levels of gaming, from the lowly QA tester to the philanthropic president who really likes video games, I can’t help but feel that the people that SAG is targeting would gladly sacrifice quality for the sake of not putting a little extra in the collection plate. They’ve been doing it for years. How does that satisfy the shareholders? Pro-tip: It doesn’t. Worse comes to worst, they’ll sacrifice a beloved franchise with a predatory mobile port for some upfront cash, then kill off the studio and fire everyone involved before they can collect their bonus.

If this industry has to go back to having the developers themselves provide their untrained voices, I fear that’s exactly what they’ll do, and nobody should have to suffer through another fully voiced Ultima.

Voice Actors Are Preparing For A Strike


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The Screen Actors Guild has announced that it will be going on strike, barring a last minute deal, against a set list of game developers over a fallout in negotiations over contract deals. The union will be reentering negotiations today, however has warned its members to be prepared in case these last minute negotiations do not come to an agreeable solution.

We head back to the table Oct. 17-19 with the goal of creating a fair contract that is rooted in industry standards and best practices. Based on past experience, we are not confident management is willing to make the changes necessary to bring this contract up to the standards of our other agreements. Unless you hear differently from us, effective Oct. 21 at 12:01 a.m., you should be prepared to strike the following video game employers with regard to all games that went into production after Feb. 17, 2015:

Developers targeted in the strike include Activision, Electronic Arts, Disney, Insomniac, WB, and Take Two, among others. So hold your Nolan North games tight, he may not be appearing in much for a while.

(Source: SAG)