Hollick received $100,000 for 15 months of voice-over recording and motion capture work. To your average student gamer working in hospitality or retail, this might seem like a lot of money, but as the star of a game that has made well into the multi-millions of dollars in the last few weeks alone, Hollick thinks it's a little unfair. Hollick: “Obviously I’m incredibly thankful to Rockstar for the opportunity to be in this game when I was just a nobody, an unknown quantity. 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. Yes, the technology is important, but it’s the human performances within them that people really connect to, and I hope actors will get more respect for the work they do within those technologies.”
Certainly, with film and TV stars receiving pay-day bonanzas well into the millions, Hollick feels that the Screen Actors Guild has overlooked the role of videogame talent. There's also the issue of promotional material and the internet, which smacks of the recent months-long strike by the Writer's Guild. “For instance, our contracts say nothing about the use of voices for promotional purposes over the Internet,” Mr. Hollick said. “The first GTA IV trailer generated something like 40 million hits online, and that’s my voice all over it, and I get nothing. If that were a radio spot, I would have. Same thing for the TV ads. I recorded those lines for the game, but now they’re all over television. It’s another gray area.”
In the same article, Ezra J. Doner, a lawyer for Hollywood entertainment companies, countered by suggesting, “The actor whose appearance or voice is used is more analogous to a session music for a band. The session musicians don’t get residuals on the sales of the CD. They get paid a session fee. It’s not like the star quality of Tom Cruise that’s getting people to buy that video game.”
However, this hasn't stopped other Grand Theft Auto IV actors from drawing attention to their situation. Jason Zumwalt, the man behind Niko's cousin, Roman, posted this humorous video on YouTube recently, suggesting many of the same points as Hollick. As the videogame industry is still young and beginning to make extraordinary amounts of money, we may expect this issue to crop up again as more and more 'blockbuster' games hit the shelves.
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