The voice actors' strike shows its claws | Opinion
It may have fallen out of the public consciousness a little bit since it began at the end of July, but the strike action by video game voice actors in the SAG-AFTRA union remains very much active. A picket was held at Electronic Arts' studio in Los Angeles this week – but arguably much more impactful, at least in terms of widespread attention for the strike, was the launch on Wednesday of the latest major update to the immensely successful Genshin Impact.
The update, which brought with it several hours of new main storyline quests, arrived with one quite jarring omission: two of the central characters in the current arc of the story are missing English-voiced dialogue, making this the first noticeable impact that the strike has had on a major shipping title.
Genshin Impact is exactly the kind of title that really ends up in the crosshairs of this kind of strike action, much like how regular episodic TV suffers the most from strikes in that industry. As a live-service game whose updates are expected to bring large amounts of story content, it has to produce a huge amount of voiced dialogue in multiple languages on a relatively short and inflexible timescale.
A more monolithic title could work around a strike to some extent, but Genshin lacks flexibility not only in terms of timing but also in terms of which actors they use. Players will definitely notice if fan-favourite characters are suddenly voiced by a different actor in a new patch – we know they'll notice, because they certainly made their feelings very clear on the handful of occasions where this has been unavoidable in the past for various reasons.
In the current situation – which, according to IGN's reporting, stems from one of several studios Genshin Impact uses for voice acting having failed to come to an agreement regarding the strike – developer Hoyoverse was left with few options, and no good ones.
It may only be one case, but it does demonstrate that the strike has claws; if a company with the scale and
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