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Sunday Comics: Dead Island
A transportation strike in Romania, of all things, is being blamed for a delay in the next Battlefield: Bad Company 2 patch on the PC.
Keith Olbermann has called me down to the union hall to surrender my liberal card. The MSNBC commentator disagrees with Saturday’s Stick Jockey, about replacement players from the 1995 baseball strike being denied an appearance in video games.
The Screen Actors’ Guild’s rejection of a contract with video game makers can be seen as a tempest in a teapot – 80 percent of voice work in games is non-union. But the L.A. Times goes further to see what’s really at stake.
A contract proposal hammered out between the Screen Actors Guild and video game publishers was shot down after a union vote. A key sticking point seemed to be “atmospheric” work, in which one actor voices multiple minor characters.
Two major unions supplying voice actors for video games have both won pay raises under provisional new contracts, which also spell out terms for “vocally stressful” work and “atmospheric” roles in which one person voices multiple minor characters.
GameStop employees can’t get paper checks. True, most of the civilised world is on direct deposit by now. But for GameStoppers who aren’t, the only alternative is a cash card that nickel-and-dimes them.
Yes, Australia’s new Minister for Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy is Senator Stephen Conroy. The same Senator Conroy that promised Labor would assemble a committee to discuss the potential for a 40% tax rebate for Oz game developers. A rebate the film and television industry already enjoys.
This exciting bit of news was announced yesterday, and the Game Developers’ Association of Australia (GDAA) couldn’t be happier.
Said GDAA CEO Greg Bondar:
“The GDAA now looks forward to working with Senator Conroy to progress the establishment of a high level committee to review the GDAA’s call for a 40% tax rebate for the games industryâ€
Now, let’s pray that this was one of Labor’s core promises.
Full GDAA press release after the jump.
Finally, some uplifting news on the Australian game developer rebate front. Out of a recent meeting this morning between GDAA CEO Greg Bondar and deputy senate leader for the opposition Stephen Conroy, has come the promise that if Labor is elected, Conroy will “establish a high level committee to review the GDAA’s call for a 40% tax rebate for the games industry in Australia”.
Okay, it’s so-so news. There’s no guarantee that anything will happen under a Labor Government – a committee is something you form before a war, not during. However, we know conclusively that nothing will happen if the Coalition is re-elected, and for those hunting desperately for even a foal’s chance of a rebate, this is as good as it’s going to get.
You can read the full release after the jump.
