How a Tiny Indie Game Managed to Recruit a Star-Studded Cast Featuring the Voices of Arthur Morgan and More [IGN]

It sounds like a roster for the latest AAA blockbuster. But it’s not. Gonzalez was able to wrangle this cast despite being a mostly-solo indie developer working on a game with a budget under $50,000. How did he do it?

Gonzalez is one of a number of indie developers who have signed an agreement with the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), allowing them to use union labor in their productions at reduced, indie-friendly rates in return for a number of protections for the actors themselves.

The agreement also includes a new provision that regulates how studios can use actors’ voices in training AI models, which means that projects signed under it are exempt from the current SAG-AFTRA video game actor strike. As a result, projects like Rosewater have access to some of the industry’s most famous actors, while most AAA games do not.

Dreams Come True

Gonzalez has been making games since 2001. Inspired by classic adventure games, many of which had voice acting, Gonazalez has often used voice actors in his projects over the years. At first, this meant working with non-union actors, many of whom were working on their first-ever video game projects. Gonzalez says he had a good experience with all of these actors, many of whom went on to join SAG-ATRA. But more recently, he’s felt drawn to support union labor.

At first, Gonzalez didn’t think he’d be able to make Rosewater a union project. He did some math on his previous game, Lamplight City, which had 70 speaking roles, around 8,000 lines of dialogue, a cast of 19 actors, and 30 two-hours voiceover sessions. Knowing what he spent on Lamplight City, Gonzalez was able to estimate that Rosewater would cost about twice as much. It had more dialogue, and while union base rates were reasonable, when combined with studio rental costs, pension and healthcare fees, and workers comp, he didn’t see a way forward for a game with his small budget.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and every single voice actor started recording from home studios. While some actors had done this pre-pandemic, suddenly every single actor Gonzalez could have wanted had a setup at home that made studio rental and other extra expenses unnecessary. As a result, he was able to return to his publisher to ask for a slight increase in his actor budget, and with it, afford to turn Rosewater into a fully union-acted game under SAG-AFTRA’s Low Budget Interactive Agreement.

“I guess this idea that, to go union, you’re going to have to deal with these mountains of paperwork, it’s going to be all this crazy stuff, you’re going to have to deal with agents and it’s going to be super complicated,” he says. “There is some truth to that, but it’s really a lot easier than I thought.”

Under his new agreement with SAG-AFTRA, Gonzalez set out to hire voice actors for Rosewater. He made a fantasy cast list based on actors whose work he knew and loved from other narrative games. Of the 22 people on the list, he expected maybe four or five would say yes. But every single one agreed. “I was over the moon.”

It seems #VoiceActors is trending, so here’s your periodic reminder that the cast of my upcoming adventure game ROSEWATER is absolutely stacked! pic.twitter.com/julx33cN7d

— Francisco González (@GrundislavGames) April 16, 2024

Among those actors was Cam Clarke, who voiced Leonardo in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon from the 80s. Gonzalez had grown up with the show and was a huge fan of Clarke. Needless to say, when Clarke agreed to the role “within five minutes,”, he was thrilled.

“I think a lot of smaller developers also have this fear, where it’s like, ‘Oh, my project isn’t good enough,’ or, ‘It’s not noteworthy enough for any well-known actors to want to work on it,’ but that’s really not the case,” Gonzalez says. “Most voice actors and most union voice actors are just working actors who want to work. They’re not necessarily going to turn something down just because it’s a smaller budget thing. The whole point of the union establishing these rates is because they themselves internally have put forth a rate that they consider to be appropriate and fair.”

Sarah Elmaleh, a member of the SAG-AFTRA IMA negotiating committee and performer in numerous games including Rosewater, agrees with this sentiment.

“Generally speaking we all just love to work – we love to work with people willing to meet our fair baselines of pay and protection, and we love to work with people who are excited to work with us,” she says. “Because I started my career in them, I’ve always known there’s a world of diverse, enriching, personal stories and experiences in smaller game projects. I’m definitely not the only actor who’s had a great time on bigger games who also actively seeks smaller ones out for creative fulfillment and variety. I think that’s becoming more and more true every day, as we see more generations of game performers who play games, who grew up playing games, like me.”

Plenty of Actors

Recently, SAG-AFTRA announced that its video game actors would be going on strike. After 18 months of struggles to come to a new contract agreement with game companies, the two sides are at an impasse over (effectively) one big issue: AI protections. Effectively, actors are demanding that all video game performers: face, motion, and voice be given adequate protections to ensure that their performances are not used to create or train digital replicas of themselves without information, consent, and adequate compensation. And they’re willing to avoid offering their services to video game companies until that demand is met.

But that strike doesn’t extend to all video game companies. There are a few exceptions carved out, and among them are studios that have signed onto an interim AI agreement that essentially agrees to the protections the actors are fighting for anyway. Gonzalez is one of the developers who has signed the agreement. Though recording was already finished by the time the strike hit, actors are free to promote Rosewater throughout the strike. And the provisions were easy for him to sign onto: he doesn’t want to use AI in his games anyway.

“At least with respect to voice acting and creating a digital replica, I just feel it’s lazy and it’s stealing work from actors,” he says. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to just say, ‘I need a pickup of this line,’ instead of going through the trouble of creating a whole digital replica just to spit out a line because they didn’t say something particularly the way you thought they were going to say. Also, it just, it doesn’t sound right. I’ve heard some digital replicas and they just still sound off. You can’t get that same nuance from a machine.

“I’m sure it’ll get to the point where the technology will advance to the point where it’s a lot harder but, at the same time, why would we even need to bother with that? Let’s just use voice actors. There’s plenty out there.”

In addition to the interim agreement, Gonzalez has also signed onto the new “tiered” low-budget game agreement, which features different tiers of rates for union actors depending on the budget of the game being worked on. As Elmaleh explains to me, the most recent agreement is “a total revamp of the original Low Budget Agreement we came out with years ago, with more tiers for more budgets.” Additionally, she says that SAG-AFTRA is “also offering revamped guides for those who’ve never administered a SAG-AFTRA contract before, and lots of open outreach and messaging to invite people in.”

“I’ve been doing this individually for many years, and now staff and committee are all behind this effort,” she adds.

Gonzalez, at least, doesn’t need any further convincing. He’s already committed to using union work on his next game, and recommends the arrangement to other indies as well. Gonzalez tells me he wants to work in the long-term on a provision that allows for pickup sessions to be done at a prorated cost for indies, but other than that, is quite happy with the terms.

“I’m union 100% going forward, as much as I can and as much as I can afford it,” he says.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.