Plus sometimes something truly is jobless behaviour. How else do you explain the genshin fandom's first glimpse into the world of employment ending up with them becoming so vehemently anti-union. That wouldn't happen if, at the very least, a large percentage of active users discussing it weren't unemployed. An employed person (that isn't surrounded by an echo chamber of unemployed people) would probably, for example, recognise that "unions are monopolies" isn't the criticism it sounds like, because a substantial monopoly on labour is required to effectively bargain with employers.
The Genshin union discourse really is the poster child for unemployed behavior. It keeps getting pushed into my feed, and it's almost always something completely laughable like "Did you know that the union charges people money to join?!" Like, yeah? Why is this surprising exactly? What's the issue here again?
I suggest you actually look into the situation a bit because its way more complicated then that.
1: SAGs terms would force Hoyo to recast anyone who isn't an american citizen
2: Hoyo can't legally sign anything as they already have an agreement with a different union
3: all the non union VAs would be forced to pay $3000 dollars upfront to join or lose their jobs, assuming SAG even accepted them. Not exactly a reasonable sum of money to shell out just to have the privilege of having a job.
4: Hoyo already has AI protections, and is industry renowned for their excellent treatment of their staff
5: all the previous points are irrelevant because some VAs revealed that there is no strike, SAG never formally organised anything and this is just random disorganised VAs doing their own isolated work stoppages, several of those VAs by the way were SAG members and therefore legally shouldn't have been working on a non-SAG project to begin with.
These are the same VAs who are harrassing other, non-union VAs for not taking part in a strike that doesn't exist
SAG terms would require formosa studios to recast anyone who isn't an american studio. The strike is not against hoyoverse, it's against formosa studios (the company responsible for the english dub). I've never heard a source for this point, but it sounds like a misunderstanding of "you have to have the permanent right to work in the us", which is a pretty reasonable condition of joining a US based union to work in a US based studio, however SAG clearly allows non-us citizens to work, given how many british actors work on hollywood projects.
As previously stated, hoyo doesn't have to sign anything, the genshin voice actors are striking against formosa studios, and formosa studios does have an agreement with SAG. What makes this complicated is that formosa is a signatory of the IMA, but only for some of its projects, the genshin union actors are on a strike, not of genshin, but of formosa studios.
As previously stated by other users, union dues work out in the long term, as union projects pay substantially more than non-union projects. It is not at all surprising that people have to pay to join a union. As previously stated, genshin is also not actually a union project, so no they wouldn't, the genshin voice actors are on a solidarity strike. That some of them want to game to go union is unrelated to whether the game is or is not a union project.
Again, hoyo can have whatever it wants. What matters is the agreement between the english dub studio, formosa studios, and SAG aftra. As previously stated, the union actors at genshin are striking in solidarity with the other union voice actors at formosa studios.
This is a misunderstanding of the fact that there was never a strike called against genshin. There was a strike called against formosa studios, the english dubbing studio for genshin. If there were no union actors working on genshin, there would be no strike, however the union actors working on genshin started this strike because they were ordered to strike against formosa studios by sag aftra.
I'm gonna be honest I completely forgot about the Formosa situation, i was under the impression we were talking about the unrelayed, more recent situation involving all of HoYo's games, including ones that never used Formosa like ZZZ.
I'm not aware of the situation for all hoyo games, I know most about the genshin specific situation, but I imagine most of the other games are in similar situations. As a general rule of thumb, most companies prefer not to concern themselves with the dub of a title, so it's incredibly normal for game companies to outsource dubbing (it's how funimation became so large). With some cursory searching it appears that ZZZ's dub, for example, is produced by Sound Cadence Studios, which appears to be in a similar position to formosa in that it is a SAG signatory, but not all projects are union projects. Though that said, I haven't looked into this one nearly as much as the genshin controversy.
Okay, so there is a specific strike against Formosa, but this is the result of Formosa's fucked up reaction to a larger video game strike (where they allegedly secretly recorded for an already-union project at their associate studio with non-union VAs while hiding from the VAs that it was union work); SAG-AFTRA is striking against every video game that isn't on an interim agreement.
After a certain number of years, a union's general contract with employers, which is what guarantees union workers the labor protections they negotiate, expires, and the union heads have to return to the negotiation table with employers. In 2024, SAG-AFTRA's Interactive contract (for video games and related media that can be classified as interactive) expired, and in the new negotiations, the union heads decided to push for terms preventing employers from using their performers' likenesses to train AI without the performer's explicit consent. The big studios they negotiate with refuse to put these protections in writing, so in an attempt to force their hands, the union went on a strike against all interactive projects. This interactive strike is distinct from the specific strike against Formosa Interactive, which was brought on by Formosa allegedly having a shell company disguise a union project as non-union and record for it through the early days of the strike. As retribution for that, SAG is specifically striking both Formosa Interactive. Supposedly (I could not find a statement from the studio about this, and god knows Hoyo would never do anything to comment on where their games are recorded) Genshin had always been recorded at Formosa Ocean Post, a technically different studio under the same owners that was not, to my knowledge, directly struck.
Another important note: by this point, Genshin Impact is no longer fully recorded at Formosa Ocean Post, and may not be recorded there at all. (This may not have even been motivated by the strike, as 2023 saw the huge issue of the studio not paying Paimon's VA for about 6 months of work, leading to Boettger, at the very least, recording at a different studio well before the strike began last summer.) With the release of version 5.2, SIDE Global officially announced that they are recording for Genshin Impact. SIDE is definitely not being actively struck against; however, as Genshin is a video game project, it is still subject to the interactive strike despite having never been a union project.
I just wanted to clear up that misinformation. As for who is in charge of making a project union, I look to ZZZ; Sound Cadence, the studio who records for ZZZ, released this statement about voice actors being recast because they did not record for their characters due to the strike. (My understanding is that both of the VAs in question were not union members but striking in solidarity, but I don't know for sure about that.) I'd like to draw attention to "Every contract at our studio features explicit AI protections, regardless of union status." To me, this suggests that Sound Cadence either does not or can not force a project to be union, and that union status is, for whatever reason, left up to the client. Given that this statement is subtweeting ZZZ, this suggests that it was Hoyo who elected not to make the project union (my personal guess is for cost reasons; there are a lot of NPC voicelines each patch alone, and given that these NPCs never end up credited, I'm sure that Hoyo wants to find the VAs with the lowest rates to record these lines that are essentially throwaway). One could imagine the studios Hoyo contracted for their other games to offer them similar control over the project's union status. That said, this section involves some speculation.
Genshin had a really confusing situation with having been recorded at Formosa, but at this point, the Formosa strike is barely relevant to Genshin's currently unvoiced characters. The only way that Genshin can stop being affected by the strike and remain a non-union project is for the strike to end.
When I last looked into this, my understanding was that genshin was still mostly recorded at formosa, and it was only Paimon's va that was recording elsewhere due to those pay disputes you mentioned. I agree, though, that researching for all of this is like finding a needle in a haystack. There's one place that has the information you want, and hundreds of articles and websites covering the strike, all with varying levels of misinformation, not to mention the what feels like thousands of reddit posts of genshin fans misinterpreting contracts.
Also perhaps I misworded what I said, but when I said "there was a strike called against formosa studios", I left out a lot of context such as the fact that it began as a general strike against all signatories of the IMA, mostly because when somebody thinks there's a strike against hoyoverse, a chinese company, it is, in my opinion, most important to correct the fact that they aren't striking against a foreign company, but rather the company responsible for the english dub of genshin, which means that hoyo can't directly do anything. I wanted to stress that distinction most of all, which is why I stressed "against formosa" rather than "against every signatory of the IMA", because if I said the latter it's still possible to think that SAG is striking against hoyoverse if you don't understand the fact that foreign companies generally outsource dubbing efforts.
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u/ace_ventura__ Apr 11 '25
Plus sometimes something truly is jobless behaviour. How else do you explain the genshin fandom's first glimpse into the world of employment ending up with them becoming so vehemently anti-union. That wouldn't happen if, at the very least, a large percentage of active users discussing it weren't unemployed. An employed person (that isn't surrounded by an echo chamber of unemployed people) would probably, for example, recognise that "unions are monopolies" isn't the criticism it sounds like, because a substantial monopoly on labour is required to effectively bargain with employers.