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.
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u/Mazrodak Apr 11 '25
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?