66
Baldur's Gate 3 performer says developers don't value voice actors as much as the audience does
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
66 points (100.0% liked)
Games
21161 readers
334 users here now
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
- No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia. Don't care if it's ironic don't post comments or content like that here.
- Mark spoilers
- No bad mouthing sonic games here :no-copyright:
- No gamers allowed :soviet-huff:
- No squabbling or petty arguments here. Remember to disengage and respect others choice to do so when an argument gets too much
- Anti-Edelgard von Hresvelg trolling will result in an immediate ban from c/games and submitted to the site administrators for review. :silly-liberator:
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Doesn't seem to be the case here, Samantha Béart just mentioned the disconnect between how players treat them and how the developers do, where VA's don't feel like they are part of the team.
I can't speak for how it is in the US or Europe, but here in Brasil, VA's tend to be respected a lot by viewers/players. And besides maybe 2 or 3 people here, as far as I know, they are not really anywhere to the level of pay and treatment that actors receive. In fact, at least in the video game industry, localization efforts are actually kinda of a shitshow, since these VA's have to do the most they can with the least amount of referencing of the original possible. Most times they don't even have access to the characters model and scene they are dubbing/acting and only has the voice of the original VA to go by, which can result in subpar or even a bad performance. And that's not even factoring in the tight deadlines they are subject to.
But in the case of voiced characters, that's usually a rather important part of said character. A bad VA performance can ruin a good written character, and a good VA performance can elevate an otherwise bad or forgettable one.
Are they? They do line reads in maybe a few afternoons and leave usually no? They contribute, but it doesn't shock me that players treat them like they were more involved in the game than they actually were because they're one of the most visible parts, but complaining about treatment from devs I mean....what are we specifically talking about, just seems like interpersonal office politics stuff, most VAs wouldn't even interact with most developers, probably just writers and however does the voice direction. This just seems like asking for privileges that most devs don't get (when VAs already get most of the player adoration), or, to be fairer to VAs, maybe be invited for studio events or something if they were a part of the game that's being celebrated.
Yeah I also think it's important I mean I prefer games to be mostly voiced rather than not, like I don't think I could go back to social links in persona not being fully voiced like in Reload (and I expect them to be paid for every line), but I mean you can only polish a turd so far with good voice work, if the all the tech shit and gameplay sucks ass no one is going to care about the voice acting, you only care about it if everything below it actually works and VAs have 0 to do with that, they just get added on top at the end, and maybe there's something to be said about devs not, like, taking VA's opinions about characters as they are writing them but....idk just feels to hear about voice actor concerns that seem so minor when they are a numerically small part of the industry compared to devs, and the troubles with game development seem to be much more severe on the developer side.
I think this would have been a fine argument 10 years ago or so, but nowadays the blockbuster game projects are expected to have years of live service / continued development. Looking at games like Marvel Rivals or Vermintide with ensemble casts, every major update the devs are bringing the VAs back in to record new or re-record old voice lines with major updates. Depending on the update schedules for such games, this could be as often as bringing the VAs back every other week or so. Doubly so if the studio uses the same actors for multiple projects. Marvel Rivals releases a new playable character every 4 weeks, and their characters have dialogue interactions between all the other characters that have to be recorded.
In those cases it makes sense to have a closer relation between studio and recurring VAs. But that's still a small number of games, I think most VA work is still one-off with a small percentage of games that get 1 dlc that brings some characters back
As far as I know, yeah, most of their work is like that. Maybe that is what she wants to get at with this criticism? Can't really know since the article was so short.
In another comment in this thread someone mentioned Supergiant does things differently where VA's are regular staff members, not just contractors, and that's probably a much better way honestly. That's probably much bigger job security, specially for the smaller VA's that might not even get enough work to be a full-time VA, while also allowing for more distinct voice acting, since you don't have the issue of the same people over and over again on every somewhat big game, which is not necessarily a problem performance wise if they have great acting range, but would be cool to have more VA's in general showing their talent.