= Were you “acting” ?

non-voice actors were paid

I feel like being paid for it would kinda make them a VA, but sure.

And if the quality of AI voice were that bad, it would be worthless anyway and noone would create/use packages for it.

I wouldnt pay extra for an AI version of an actor I liked.

If course. It is about paying less after all.
The actor decided to get some passive income by licensing their TTS and someone used it as they wanted. That’s all there is to it.

Apart from maybe, being able to get the AI to create different accented versions of a VA (which, said VA doesn’t do otherwise), the AI voice will mostly be of a lower grade than a good VA. Which is what makes it unfit for foreground roles, which the user will be actively listening to.
You definitely don’t want cutscenes to be filled with half-assed rubbish, which might be otherwise, fine for background chatter, where it is just filling the silence. And in cases where the background chatter is a part of the experience and the devs care about it, they will be getting active VAs like they currently do. There are more perfectionists in artistic fields than one would expect.

It was my first Dragon Age game and I liked it.
Made me interested in the older titles.

Both can be done.

Depends upon who takes it first.
If VAs don’t make it efficient for themselves, their clients will make it so and the one who does it, gets to pocket the savings.

voice actors would agree with your license idea

The ones who won’t, are probably also those with good enough exp and able to get into “foreground” roles.

The ones who would, can now have a passive income.

I don’t really think of it that way.
Instead, more like:

• If there’s no voice, noone got paid
• If there is a voice, someone got paid x (> 0) amount
  • And if the offered amount was lower than what the VA would expect ^[1], then the dev won’t get the license

Also, in the above condition, the VA only needs to make the TTS package once (then maybe a few upgrades if the standard gets updated) and gets to reuse it for multiple licenses.

The system you described would mean only the biggest names get paid

Rather, it’s more like, we as the user get a greater variety of background NPC banter, for the same game price.

Take X4 for instance. The only banter we get is different types of “hello”.
Only in cases of quests, is there any dialogue variety. When there is any such banter out of quests, it’s mostly incoherent (or was that another game, I need to check again).
It doesn’t really make sense that 2 or more people meet in a docking area, say, “Hi”, “Hello”, “Good day to you” and then just keep on standing staring at each other’s faces as if they were using some sort of telepathy, or just staring at each other without any conversation.
It would be fun to be able to have conversations that, while clear that they would not be able to yield any Quest, should still have variety enough to be fun when the player stops by, eavesdropping.
This sort of thing is there in a lot of games by high budget studios, while at the same time, the games have pretty large file sizes.
This way, we can reduce both production and distribution costs.

And the VAs, they don’t need to do all the work of speaking each dialogue every time the story writers come up with new banter, but the studio will be getting their voice for those lines, essentially increasing the value of the licensed TTS package, meaning the VA gets more work done than the work they do and gets paid more (well, the last part depends more upon the market condition).

You are right. I don’t want to have to socialise just to add a bit of voice to my game characters.
If I have to, I’d rather ship without voicing any of them.

The content is… AI assisted (maybe a better way to put it).
And yes, now you don’t need to get the VA every time you add a line, as long as the License for the TTS data holds.

You still want to be having proper VAs for lead roles though. Or you might end up with empty feeling dialogues. Even though AI tends to put inflections and all, from what I have seen, it’s not good enough to reproduce proper acting.
Of course that would mean that those who cannot do the higher quality acting ^[1] will be stuck with only making the TTS files, instead of getting lead roles.

But that will mean that now, places where games could not afford to add voice, they now can. Specially useful for cases where someone is doing a one dev project.

Even better if there can be an open standard format for AI training compatible TTS data. That way, a VA can just pay a one time fee to a tech, to create that file, then own said file and licence it whichever way they like.

I just re-read my comment and realised I was not clear enough.
You bundle the text and the AI-TTS. Not the AI text generator.

One can dream.

A really good place would be background banter. Greatly reducing the amount of extra dialogues the devs will have to think of.

1. Give the AI a proper scenario, with some Game lore based context, applicable to each background character.
2. Make them talk to each other for around 5-10 rounds of conversation.
3. Read them, just to make sure nothing seems out of place.
4. Bundle them with TTS for each character sound type.

Sure, you’ll have to make a TTS package for each voice, but at the same time, that can be licensed directly by the VA to the game studio, on a per-title basis and they too, can then get more $$$ for less work.

1. I feel like Steam has gotten rid of the invite thingy, because I can clearly see the “Buy Now” button.
2. I don’t have VR 🥲

Nvm, I was looking at the wrong game. Doesn’t look even close to a Third Person Shooter. More like an Inside the Person Shooter

Yeah, that’s most probably the case.

Doesn’t stop me from wanting to join though.

That feels like free advertising to potential job-seekers.

If just a few staff are running the whole thing, it means they are all probably the kind that do more actual work and less politics. That means, if anyone interested in learning fast and getting good at their field were to work there, they would have the time of their life.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

You forgot the “at least” before the 52%.

It’s also illegal (in writing) to have a random sticker on a screw of an appliance, stating “Warranty void if removed”.
Doesn’t stop anyone from using it to escape warrantying user stuff, simply because it is not enforced well enough.

I’m guessing you haven’t heard of the Roku television debacle.

You can just decline and play without some multiplayer features.

Though, in my case, it crashed on game start, probably due to unrelated reasons (I’m on linux).

But I think loading a previous version is also an option (as I read somewhere). Never tried though.

Ah you’re right. Rereading it fixed the doubt. Guess I skipped a few words the first time.
Mental note to not skip words in a legal document. Or any written document.

I don’t get this part.
How come they explicitly state the European Economic Area, while at the same time, it doesn’t apply there?

Or do the European Economic Area and EU refer to different things?

Or is it that they thought the user will not care to check in case they have a problem big enough to seek legal aid?

XCOM2: War of The Chosen.

Forgot to add the name in the title since I first posted in the XCOM2 sub. 😜

US citizens are being asked to waive their rights to class actions or any form

You don’t need to be in the US for that.
I am not.

I fail to understand why they feel the need to do this, considering people are not just suing these companies willy-nilly.

But if you look closely, they don’t mention anywhere that this Mandate is only with regards to this specific product (XCOM2 in this case), which makes me think, all of these companies are planning to do some problematic thing separately and then use this to escape the consequences.

Thanks for the constructive criticism.

alt text for these non mobile friendly pictures

Yeah, I miserably failed at that part. Tried to add the alt text, but looks like I did it the wrong way so it didn’t work.

mention what you actually are trying to say or ask

Just wanting to let people know about another instance of Mandatory Arbitration. After hitting Post, I did realise that I should have included the game’s name, which I missed because I first posted this to an XCOM2 sub.

Same post on reddit

But since you are here, prefer answering here.

“Why” is a kind of question that is answered with stuff like, “Because <object> exists!”