Strong labor negotiations and contracts are how some of the happiest countries in the world deal with these kinds of things. You don't need to sit around and wait for a law to be passed by bribed politicians when you have a strong union willing to act.

Are we aware of any big name titles that are not complete because they didn’t have actors?

Is there any chance this contributed to latest GTA6 delay?

Or did all of the major studios just switch to actors that are not part of a guild/union?

The SAG-AFTRA post where they list what's actually in the agreement.

Now that the new contract has been ratified, video game performers will see an immediate 15.17% increase in compensation with additional 3% increases in November of this year, and in November 2026 and November 2027.

Additionally, the overtime rate maximum for overscale performers will now be based on double scale. Health and retirement contribution rates have been increased as well, with an immediate 0.5% AFTRA Retirement Fund boost and another 0.5% boost starting in October 2026.

The new contract also establishes foundational guardrails around A.I., including informed consent requirements across various A.I. uses and the ability for performers to suspend informed consent for digital replica use during a strike.

I wonder what they had to give up.

Come 2027 they won’t need to hire anyone. The capitalists in charge will have enough to just use Ai.

Curious what it says about their likenesses rights and how much of their performance do they own vs what they can train Ai on.

Unless AI has another meteoric rise in performance and reliability, there zero chance it will be able to produce even the turdiest of games. I'd love to see a big studio try and fail though, like Microsoft.

The tech isn't good enough for that

Tested and failed https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/07/05/google-veo-3-fails-week-3-fail-harder-with-a-vengeance/

Yet… doesn’t mean they won’t have stipulations in their contracts to own the performers likeness in the future.

Rockstar actually went into hiring frenzy after the last delay, and it wasn’t just QA people this time but very fundamental positions like senior physics programmers, art leads, UX engineers and so.

I actually had many friends interviewed, some hired but most scared off as R* people made it pretty clear they’re walking into a mess.

To me, R* is trying to give birth to a baby in 1 month by hiring 9 pregnant people.

In VO terms I would highly doubt capturing performances would delay anything at all, but creating/revising rest of the cinematics is a burden for the devs. And R* would know better VO isn’t a part to go skimpy. Often, VO work gets completed way before the else.

huh, interesting! It’s The Mythical Man-Month! That book was published back in 1975. They definitely know better, but must be in quite a pickle.