Contracts for game actors are a nightmare in the UK

The conclusion of SAG-AFTRA’s 11-month strike brought some clarity to contracts for game actors in the US. The union won agreements on issues like pay scales and clear disclosure over the use of AI-generated digital replicas. The deal isn’t perfect – not least because technology is developing faster than contract negotiations can keep up with – but it gave US-based talent a solid foundation at a time when in-game performances have become key elements of smash hits like Baldur’s Gate 3.

“There’s definitely more clarity in all of the contracts that we have, and in what to expect,” says Los Angeles-based actor Anjali Bhimani, whose roles include Symmetra in Overwatch and Rampart in Apex Legends. “Everybody can relax and just do their job. That’s a huge improvement over the muddled confusion that we had.”

In the UK, by contrast, confusion still reigns. Union representation has, belatedly, started to engage with the sector, but performers are forced to navigate weaker laws, non-existent residuals, and an opaque commissioning process that will offer promises rather than contractual commitment, while agencies struggle to navigate a wide variety of rates and requirements. And, as with everything in 2025, money is tight and AI threatens enduring disruption. Conversations across the industry reveal entrenched problems that compromise performers and the games they star in.

Historical handicaps

It has taken a while for game performances to register in the UK’s performing-arts establishment. The main actors’ union for the sector, Equity, was slow to understand video games – “we were sort of lumped in with audio books and radio contracts,” recalls actor Jane Perry, who plays Selene in Returnal and Diana Burnwood in the Hitman franchise, “and of course these are very, very different creatures.” Equity only issued minimum rates for video game performers in 2024, as part of a more recent engagement with the sector that includes the Game On! campaign.

Welcome though the recommendations were, they were only recommendations – and thus freely overlooked. “Equity provided a suggested rate card as to what actors should be paid in games, but because there is no collective bargaining agreement in place, none of the vendors [who act as the middleman between game developers and the casting and recording of voice actors] are duty bound to follow it,” says Perry. “This can leave actors vulnerable because vendors are also running their businesses in a cut-throat industry, and one of the ways they might seek to remain competitive is to pitch a lower rate of fees for voice talent to the developer, in order to win the job.”

This leaves UK talent in a much weaker position than SAG-AFTRA members in the US. “Every SAG actor that I’ve spoken to,” says British actor Alix Wilton Regan (whose many roles include Alt Cunningham in Cyberpunk 2077 and The Inquisitor from Dragon Age: Inquisition), “I keep saying, ‘I don’t think you realise how much you achieved in comparison to what we are not able to achieve over here in the UK’.”

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Regan argues that Equity is relatively powerless compared with its US counterpart. “It’s really important to understand that we have different labour laws than the USA,” she says. “So Equity’s hands are somewhat tied simply because of antiquated and outdated laws that Maggie Thatcher brought in.”

Superficially, the labour laws around unions in the US and UK seem similar. “Closed shops,” whereby employers could refuse to hire non-union members, were outlawed in the US in 1947 under the Taft–Hartley Act; in the UK, they were formally banned by the Employment Act 1990. However, there are differences between the two countries. Almost all major productions in the US operate under union contracts, and if an employer wants to recruit a non-union member for a union production, they must file a “Taft–Hartley report” with SAG-AFTRA within 15 days, which will then invite the employee to join the union. Importantly, SAG-AFTRA strictly forbids its members from taking part in non-union productions.

By contrast, Equity has no such rule, and UK productions that are run under an Equity contract are open to non-union members. In addition, although Equity was vocal in its support of the SAG-AFTRA strike, its members were restricted from following suit by the Employment Act 1990, which outlawed “solidarity action,” whereby union members can walk out in sympathy with other striking workers. “There is a very big difference between what SAG-AFTRA and Equity are able to do within the constraints of their territories,” says Regan.

Fear of AI

Then, of course, there’s the looming threat of AI. “There is a tremendous amount of fear around artificial intelligence, not just for those of us in the creative industries, but across the board,” says Perry. She notes that agents and actors will typically ensure they have an “AI rider” during contract negotiations, “that stipulates that you cannot use my voice to train any of your AI models.”

But Devora Wilde – who played Lae’zel in Baldur’s Gate 3 – says that contracts still come through without restrictions against AI training. She recalls one audition at which she was told that the developers had promised not to use her voice to train AI. “And I was like, ‘So if you are not going to use my voice [to train AI], why not just put it in the contract?’ It made me a bit uncomfortable.”

Wilde wants to see more action taken to protect game actors. “What makes me disappointed about the UK industry is seeing how everybody rallied together under SAG-AFTRA […] and was like, ‘You know what? We’re all going to be in this together. If you don’t do right by us, then this is the consequence.’ And I don’t see that happening in the UK.”

She worries that too many actors will agree to contracts that allow their voices to be used in AI training. “Maybe because that’s the only job you can get, and that’s the only way you can make ends meet. I completely understand that.” She’s been in a similar situation herself – back at the start of her career, she did a stock photo shoot and signed the rights away for less than £150. “I still get messages to this day: ‘Oh my god, you were in that Barclays advert!’ Nope. No I wasn’t. That’s an image that I literally got paid a hundred pounds for. It’s sickening actually, and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

The consequences for signing the rights to your voice away are potentially even worse, as it could be manipulated to say anything at all. Bhimani refers to a TikTok account that uses the voice of one of the characters she played, and how little she can do to stop it. “I don’t have protections because this was before all of the negotiations that we had with AI, and because I don’t own the character,” she says. “My voice is literally being taken from me to say something that I would never say.”

Wilde is concerned that younger people in the profession might be lured to sign contracts without AI protections. “I think that young actors need to be educated, and hopefully we can lead the charge and talk about this issue, and just be like, ‘Listen, if we all collectively stand our ground, we are much stronger’. It’s not like [vendors are] going to go somewhere else, because they have nowhere to go if we all stand in this together. But I do understand that as an actor who is maybe not working very much – just how I was when I started out – the temptation is there to go, ‘They haven’t put in the contract, but they said they’re going to do it, so it should be fine, right?'”

It’s easy to see how hard-up young actors could be tempted to sign dubious contracts if they are struggling for cash. Regan says there’s a “contract floating around” that promises an extra £20 per hour if the actor permits their voice to be used in AI training. She notes that it’s a “laughably small amount of money” to allow your voice to be used to generate anything in perpetuity. But she fears that whereas established actors like herself might reject such offers without a second thought, younger actors might not have the luxury of turning down work – which is where it “veers into exploitation.”

To add to that financial pressure, work across the acting business is becoming harder to find as a result of the rise of AI. Perry points out that many game actors don’t exclusively work on video games. “We do everything. We do corporate videos, we do commercials, we do audio books,” she says. “Corporate videos are like the bread and butter. You just pop in, you do one, it’s no big deal, but at the end of the year, it adds up to an income that you can live on. And that work has disappeared, because a lot of people have gone to AI voices for that.”

The view from the recording booth

On the commissioning side, the problem is less about AI and more about contractual complexity. Andrew Coggan is the managing director of Backslash Audio in Liverpool; he sources actors for game companies and agencies who come to him with a role and a budget. Most of the companies he works with tend to be smaller publishers and developers who “don’t want to be associated with AI,” he says, and all of the contracts he has dealt with over the past couple of years have contained express stipulations against AI training. He notes that developers can get “publicly destroyed” – even by fellow developers – if they’re found to be using the technology.

“Most of the companies that are really looking towards development and use of AI tend to be the AAA ones with larger budgets, because for them it could represent a significant saving,” Coggan says. “It would be a lesser saving for an indie team, and would probably require more upfront work to even get working.” Instead, the main problem he faces is to do with calculations for residuals, or rather, the video game equivalent of them.

Residuals are routine for actors in TV and film – payments made when their work is redistributed, like when a TV show is repeated or a film gets a Blu-Ray re-release – but are rare in games. In the early days of video game voice recording, actors would simply charge an hourly rate, leaving them with nothing extra if their voice ended up attached to a character in a smash hit.

In response to this, game actors have added a “buyout” on top of their hourly fee, a onetime payment that in essence is meant to reflect the potential sales of the game they’re working on. “It’s their version of what they would receive as residual,” explains Coggan. The trouble is, there’s no proper consensus on how these buyouts are calculated – which means that it can be an “absolute nightmare” to put together quotes on how much an audio session will cost, says Coggan. “I did one last week, and it took me a day and a half.”

“There are many times where I will do a role and I don’t even know what I’m playing until I get to the session”

Anjali Bhimani

He says that some acting agencies will have different buyout rates according to whether they think the end client is a mid-level or AAA company. “Obviously they want to make these appropriate to the budget for the studios, which if you’re hiring directly for a studio, makes it easy,” says Coggan. The trouble is, Coggan often receives requests for audio work through an agency, and he doesn’t have any inkling about who the end client is. “I just have to say to people, ‘assume that it’s mid to AAA, but I don’t know’.”

This kind of secrecy is typical in the games industry, where actors are lucky to be even sent a script before a recording session. “There are many times where I will do a role and I don’t even know what I’m playing until I get to the session,” says Bhimani. That, of course, makes it almost impossible to work out what to charge.

Then there’s the fact that buyouts are calculated in different ways. Coggan says that some people want an additional 10–15% on top of their hourly fee. Others want a one-off flat fee no matter how many hours they spend in the recording booth, which naturally makes shorter sessions less economical for clients. “Some people make it additionally more complicated, with separate, tiered buyout fees depending on whether the voiceover is just going to be used in the game or whether it’s going to also be used in promotional material,” says Coggan. “And some have tried saying that it’s limited to particular platforms – so if you wanted to do a remaster of the game, you’d have to do an additional buyout. Those ones I’ve had to just push back on, because there’s no way that any end client that I would work for would agree to that.”

Buyouts are, Coggan concludes, “a right pain in the arse”. It’s not great for actors, either, if they’re passed over for work because of the fee structure their agency has chosen. “It’s not that I’m against actors getting these payments,” he says. But it does cause a problem for him when trying to find actors to fit a set budget, because the way that agencies calculate buyouts varies so widely.

“What I would like to see is a standardization of the rates across agencies, so that it becomes a lot quicker and easier to do estimates,” he says. “A percentage would be the easiest to deal with… so you don’t have to sit with a calculator to try and work out what the final total for a part’s going to be.” Coggan thinks this would make it a more level playing field for actors, meaning he can focus on choosing people for their suitability for a part, rather than them being “automatically ruled in or out based on a particular agency’s interpretation of [buyouts].”

Pushing back

It adds up to a bleak outlook for UK game performers, with no obvious path to more sustainable careers in the field, and no prospect of the sort of impact achieved by SAG-AFTRA. But there are signs of hope. Perry notes that AI is far from a perfect replacement for human actors; she was recently brought in to redo a corporate video after an AI voiceover made a mess of it. “The AI couldn’t manage the numbers,” she explains, recounting a performance in which years like 1995 would be voiced as 1,995. “So they’re like, ‘Damn it, we’re going to have to get a human in to do this’.”

“And then of course, they were so happy with the work that I did, because I think all of us, whenever we get a job, part of that job is: ‘Let’s solve your problem for you. You’ve got something you need, and I am going to bend over backwards and make sure that your product is the best’. And I don’t think AI is able to do that.”

Nolan Kelly is behind TIVA (True Indie Voice Art), a project in which he has collaborated with Regan, Perry, Bhimani, Wilde, and others to make freely available audiobooks that are proudly lacking in AI. But as well as being an author, Kelly is a programmer: and he thinks that in regards to AI, the situation in programming is a few years ahead of what we’re currently seeing in voice acting. “A lot of companies fired lots of people to replace them with AI, and are realising that was a mistake,” he says. “The AI can’t replace them, it makes basic mistakes. So there’s a whole new market of people being brought in to clean up the garbage that AI has made.”

His motivation for starting TIVA was to show that “there’s plenty of things AI can’t replicate,” he says. “And having actors of this quality – AI will never be able to do that, and I’m convinced of it.”

Regan is also convinced that developers aren’t keen to replace actors with AI replicas. “When you talk to developers at big studios that operate out of the UK, they love actors. The writers spend years creating these characters, and the writing rooms spend years, sometimes decades, crafting these huge stories. And for them […] the joy is seeing the actors bring it all to life. […] And when we meet these developers, they are often really quite shocked and horrified to find out what we’re being paid or how unprotected we are.”

“We don’t want to be abused as actors. That should not be a controversial point to make”

Alix Wilton Regan

She emphasises that replacing actors with AI affects the livelihoods of more than just the actors themselves: it affects all the roles associated with them, such as audio engineers, script writers, makeup artists, costume designers, directors, producers, even PR agencies. “The actors are the canaries in the coal mine sounding the alarm.”

“I think the point about AI […] is that we don’t want to be abused as actors. That should not be a controversial point to make. We want control over what’s used of our voices. We want clarity about where it’s going to go: I don’t want to do a campaign for Reform without my consent. I should be clear on where my voice and my image are being used. I want to be properly compensated for my work.

“Those three issues over control, clarity, and compensation – as far as I’m concerned, that’s not controversial. That’s called human decency and basic respect for each other as artists, actors, and humans.”

Even with hard-won legal protections in video game contracts, actors can still find their voices being manipulated by AI against their wishes. “A lot of us, certainly from the Baldur’s Gate 3 cast, have found our voices on some very questionable websites, where your voice is reading whatever the person wants,” says Wilde. “Very grim, and very dark.”

TIVA, at least, shows a way that can prevent this. The site uses an audio version of the anti-AI tool Nightshade that adds ‘poison pills’ to audio tracks: inaudible noises that distort and confuse any attempt to train an AI on the voice data. It’s a small gesture against the tide of AI that’s washing over the acting business. But in the UK, amid all the confusion over contracts and the threats to actors’ livelihoods – and with legislation that makes a SAG-AFTRA-style strike for change highly unlikely – small wins are to be celebrated.