According to a New York Times article, Hollick was paid roughly $100,000 over 15 months for his voice acting and motion-capture work on GTA IV. He complains of the fact that he will not receive royalties or residuals as he would for work on television programs, films, radio shows or albums.

“The first GTA IV trailer generated something like 40 million hits online, and that’s my voice all over it, and I get nothing,” Hollick said. “If that were a radio spot, I would have. Same thing for the TV ads.”

Contracts between the actors’ union and the entertainment industry make no provision for videogames and the Internet, classifying them as “Electronic Media”.

“Obviously I’m incredibly thankful to Rockstar for the opportunity to be in this game when I was just a nobody, an unknown quantity,” said Hollick. “But it’s tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don’t see any of it. I don’t blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games.”

I dissagree with Mr. Hollick. GTA IV sold 500 million copies in its first week, true, but if you believe for a second that any of those sales had anything to do with fans of Hollick’s voice then you are sadly mistaken. Aside from the rare chance that his mother bought a few copies. Its the game content that drives the sales of the titles, not the voice over actors. From what I can gather from most gamers out there it could be Michael J Fox doing a poor russian accent playing the role of Niko, as long as they can speed down a crowded sidewalk and mow down innocent pedestrians while listening to the “Intellegent Agenda” on the radio.

“What drives videogames is not Tracy and Hepburn; what drives it is the conception of the creative director,” said a former Hollywood executive who is now an entertainment lawyer, Ezra J. Doner. “The actor whose appearance or voice is used is more analogous to a session musician for a band. The session musicians don’t get residuals on the sales of the CD. They get paid a session fee,” he told the New York Times. “It’s not like the star quality of Tom Cruise that’s getting people to buy that videogame.”

Ryan Johnston, the voice actor who portrayed Irish hood Patrick McReary in Grand Theft Auto IV - at a pay rate of $1,050 a day,(about 50 per cent higher than the general guild-negotiated rate) said he believed it was just a matter of time before actors’ financial participation in games caught up with their popularity.

The difference between payment for traditional entertainment media and electronic media is expected to dominate negotiations between Hollywood and the actors’ guild this summer, with many predicting an actors’ strike to parallel the writers’ strike last year. A writers strike that revolved around many similar issues.

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