I’m not too keen on the specifics of Japanese copyright law, but here in the states most voicework is done under as work-for-hire. This means the voice actors sign away any rights they might have to the voicework afterward in lieu of being paid up front according to the contract. The recent SAG-AFTRA union agreement also gives union actors a tiered bonus based on a combination of the number of games sold and number of recording sessions they participated in. But overall, a voice actor usually won’t get the commercial rights back to their recordings after a license expires. The work usually belongs to the publisher.

The main issue with allowing games to use different language voice tracks isn’t legal, it’s a question of disk space. Good quality recorded audio takes a lot of disk space, so allowing players to choose different languages means we have to have all of those audio files on disk to play, or we need to download the audio files on demand and make players wait for them. This can increase the installed footprint on your hard drive, especially for post-launch DLC content because it can’t be streamed from the stamped disc, it has to be downloaded from the internet and take up space on your hard drive. We also want to keep downloads as small as possible because most players hate waiting. This is basically why we don’t always support multiple language voice options even if we have the recordings for it - we don’t think there’s enough players who would want them compared to those we’d lose by adding another few gigabytes of audio data to the download or the trouble of building an additional patch just for the audio data.

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The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

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It all depends on the scope of the project. Hypothetically, let’s say that you’re handling a game’s production and you need some voice work. Let’s say that you hire an expensive voice actor that isn’t a Hollywood star. You pay this union voice actor triple the normal pay scale ($825 x 3 = $2475) for ten sessions of recording (40 hours of recorded lines). Let’s assume that we’re also paying for studio time (around $200 per hour) as well. 40 hours of recorded lines is 10 sessions ($24,750) plus 40 hours of studio time ($8,000) for a total of around $32,750.

As a point of reference, consider the cost to employ a mid-level game dev. Mid-level devs tend to cost, on average, around $10,000 per month to employ. This isn’t limited to salary but also encompasses other costs incurred by the employee - benefits, taxes, rent, utilities, software licenses, dev kits, etc. For this amount of money, we could pay for 120 hours of recorded lines and still have over $20,000 left.

Keep in mind that 40 hours of recorded dialogue is a lot. The Witcher 3 has a total of 300 hours of recorded dialogue. This means that, using our napkin math figures above, we’re looking at a total VO cost of around $245,625 to pay for all of the Witcher 3′s voiceover work. While that sounds like a lot, that’s also only a little more than it costs to employ two mid-level developers (e.g. a programmer and a designer) for a single year. Ultimately, how much VO drains from a development budget is really a question of the amount of VO compared to the total project budget. VO is certainly not a trivial cost and it can be disproportionate depending on the budget and resource allocation of the game, but most of the time the cost of VO isn’t the limiting factor so much as the availability of the voice actors and the difficulty of making revisions once the lines have been recorded already.

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It’s a little more complicated than that. Because of how voice actors are paid, efficiently hiring voice actors becomes this weird load-balancing problem of trying to get the most voiced lines out of your dollar spent. Here’s the current pay scale for SAG-AFTRA union voice actors for “New Media - Interactive”, which encompasses video games:

The base “Day Performer” rate above is the minimum fee that an employer can pay a single voice actor for up to 3 voices during a 4-hour recording session. Additional voices incur an additional $292.00, or you can hire for short roles at $438 for 1 voice and 1 hour of recording. As you can see, hiring someone at the base rate to do 3 voices for 4 hours costs about the same as getting 2 individual voices for 1 hour each. It is often cheaper to hire one actor for multiple voices across a single session than it would be to hire individual actors, and we can even hire actors to do 6-10 voices over a 6-hour session instead.

From the production side, we have to consider how many lines each character needs to be voiced and how much time it will take to record all of the takes for each of those lines. Then we try to figure out the number of sessions we need with each voice actor to record that many lines (as well as figuring out which actor fits with which role). This gives us a general idea of how much recording time we need for each role. We can then divvy up the roles to actors whose voices that match those roles by recording session to try to get maximum value out of our money. If we have a lot of small roles, we can use them to pad out sessions that aren’t fully loaded (e.g. there’s enough lines for this role to do 3 hours, so we have an extra hour that we’ve paid for to fill with some smaller stuff). The worst case scenario is an actor with an extremely distinctive voice that only has a handful of lines to record. Then we’re paying at minimum $438 for a few minutes of recording time. Ron Perlman, for example, gets paid thousands of dollars just to record the “War… war never changes” line for each Fallout game.

So… this is how we assign roles to voice actors and whether somebody does one voice or multiple. It’s one big complicated spreadsheet problem of trying to assign roles to actors in a way that both makes sense for the actor and role as well as maximizes the value we get out of the money we pay the actors (among other factors, like scheduling and availability). 

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

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Usually the former, but it can be the latter. Conventional wisdom states that it’s easier for players to project themselves into a silent protagonist than somebody with a voice, since it’s easier to imagine yourself saying those words at that time. That’s what most silent protagonists are going for. The tradeoff is that you can lose that storytelling ability that you’d get from a top notch voice performance. There are lots of people who enjoy silent protagonists and there are plenty who enjoy voiced protagonists. It really comes down to the kind of experience that the creative leadership on the game wants to convey to the player.

That said, in some uncommon cases the number of voiced lines is just too much for the budget. SWTOR, for example, made the decision to cut the voiced protagonist in their episodic content for lower-importance/generic conversations for budgetary reasons. In their case, they would have had to record 16 different voices delivering the same lines since they had 8 different classes with different voices for male and female versions. For each protagonist line they didn’t record, they could budget roughly 16 lines of spoken dialogue from other characters. That’s pretty close to adding budget for an entire additional voiced conversation for every single protagonist line they didn’t voice. Of course, this sort of budgetary savings only happens when you have a lot of different voices for the protagonist. Most games don’t offer that many different voices. 

If it’s from the beginning of the project, it almost always comes down to what the team leadership wants. During the early planning phases, we can usually make the goal fit within the budget. The main reason we’d have to switch for budgetary reasons is when we are faced with changes in the budget after already being locked in from a previous release.

This week we continue the Design Phase of the FANTa Project!

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The thing about animation systems is that we don’t need to animate everything at the same time. Most animation systems today, especially in AAA games, are layered - you can have multiple different animations affecting a character at any given time. Take a look at Ryu’s Shin Shoryuken Ultra Combo from Street Fighter 4, for example:

In this, there are a bunch of different parts going on at the same time. Ryu’s body is moving, the camera is moving, and Ryu’s face is moving. However, these don’t all need to be done by the same animator at the same time. Maybe you want the facial expression to react to other things, like if the opponent activates an ultra move. By splitting them up, you can actually have one animator who specializes in body motions for the attack, another who specializes in facial animations, and a third who specializes in camera movements. If you look at a game like Uncharted or Tomb Raider, you can often have over a dozen different animations playing at the same time - leaning to one side, climbing, idling/breathing, injury, facial expressions, looking at a point of interest, and more all happening concurrently. You’d run out of memory trying to load every single possible variation of these, and you’d run out of development time and budget animating every unique variant. So instead, you only animate the relevant parts of the skeleton with each one, and apply them together to the rig when needed.

So what’s this got to do with voice acting and lip sync?

The first thing that the cinematics designers need is a sense of timing for the scene. How long will the lines take to say? What else will be happening? Where will the cameras cut? There’s usually some kind of storyboard put together for this, similar to what you’d see for a TV ad or a scene in a movie. The designer needs to know what the timing is like for the scene in order to figure out what they can do in the scene. Then they start putting together ideas and crafting it. They don’t need the official recordings to start though - once they have a sense of timing (with somebody from the office reading the script, or using text-to-speech programs to generate placeholder audio for timing purposes), they can put the scene together without any facial animations or lip sync. Then, once the recording is done, they can add the lip sync and facial animations in later. Also, since they know how long the lines are supposed to take, they can pass that information to the audio director to enforce when the recording does happen - the voice actor can then be told “Please say line 78 a little slower this time”, or “You need to get through line 45 much faster”.

The actual process of lip synced animations can mostly be automated these days. Spoken language tends to use a limited number of mouth movements called phonemes. English, for example, has 44 total different phonemes that can be combined to make up the entirety of the spoken language. You can write software that reads in audio files, and applies specific phoneme facial animations at specific timestamps. These animations then just get added to the facial animation layer on the character after they come in. So, if you want a rig to be able to lip sync the entire English language, you’d need an animator to go and animate each of the 44 phonemes, and then have some software to string them together. You can then add other facial expressions in addition to the mouth movement to convey emotion while speaking:

Voice recording is an expensive process that requires scheduling with the talent and booking of studio recording time. We generally pay the voice actors and recording studios by the (half) day. You need to keep in mind that a lot of voice actors are pretty busy people, and they may not be available on the days you need to record. This is a big deal if you are booking well-known SAG talent especially, since there are a handful of actors who do a lot of voice work for movies, games, television, etc. 

Because of how much money it costs to set all these things up, scheduling concerns, and enforcing compliance with union contracts, voice recording is generally the last thing in the process to happen. The writers and designers almost always draft, redraft, and finalize the game’s script before the actors are scheduled to perform. It costs very little to change the script before it’s recorded, but re-recording means that we need to find time to schedule the actor to be there, the union needs to approve it if it’s a union member, the studio needs to have an opening available, and all parties involved (the actor, the developers, and the voice director) need to meet at the studio (which may not be in the same state, let alone city). As a result, we usually only re-record under catastrophic conditions - massive content cuts to the critical path, for example. Because of these sorts of scheduling and overhead issues, we usually can’t get the actor into the studio a second time. This means that whatever gets recorded is usually final.

I'm assuming you're asking about voice acting here, so I'll just link you to David Gaider's fantastic post about how to go about becoming a voice actor. The only thing I would add is that you probably want to look into obtaining SAG membership as well, since there's some pretty stringent union rules about hiring.