Why SAG-AFTRA Is Smart to Threaten Holiday Gaming Boycott

The fourth quarter of the year has long been the final boss of the video game industry’s sales figures, delivering great rewards as players — and parents — spend big on hardware, software and battle-station accessories ahead of the holiday season.

But SAG-AFTRA is ready to hit the business where it hurts if an agreement with top gaming publishers cannot be reached today after the guild called a strike in July.

In an interview with Variety last week, SAG-AFTRA executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland explained how a boycott of gaming’s critical holiday quarter is on the table if the parties don’t settle on the last of 25 proposals, which seeks protective provisions against the use of generative AI in games, predominantly when it comes to motion and performance capture as well as voice acting.

“These businesses run on both supply and demand,” said Crabtree-Ireland, highlighting how SAG-AFTRA has yet to seriously disrupt that demand. “The holiday period is a particularly effective time, if we were to choose to do that, to deploy a campaign like that.”

The early pandemic years were an enormous boon for gaming publishers. But those same companies have since resorted to round after round of layoffs and game cancellations as AAA titles in the console and PC space grow more expensive and timelier to make, resulting in challenging sales expectations.

This year has already surpassed 13,000 layoffs globally as companies including Activision Blizzard consolidate under new parental structures, such as Microsoft Gaming in the “Call of Duty” publisher’s case. A franchise with annual releases and a live service, “Call of Duty” has never missed its Q4 window for new mainline games.

“Black Ops 6,” its next big title, is due Friday after SAG-AFTRA’s bargaining session Wednesday with Activision and U.S.-based companies such as EA, Take-Two, Warner Bros. Games and Sony’s Insomniac studio.

By the start of October, 90 game titles had signed onto SAG-AFTRA"s proposed Interim Media Agreement or a separate indie-focused Tiered-Budget Independent Interactive Agreement. The guild has so far hit the industry on a game-by-game basis, raising eyebrows last month when it added “League of Legends” to its list of struck games.

Developed and published by Tencent-owned Riot Games, “League of Legends” had not actually violated any of the guild’s terms but was simply the biggest credit of Formosa Interactive, a voice-acting services company that allegedly attempted to cancel another struck title, which prompted SAG-AFTRA to file an unfair labor practice charge against its parent Formosa Group.

The guild’s desire to consider a publisher-wide boycott for the remainder of Q4 is a far more coherent approach in line with how SAG-AFTRA and the WGA struck Hollywood’s major studios, networks and platforms in 2023. Like the tumultuous 2024 facing the gaming industry, last year saw the film and TV industry struggling to survive an advertising recession as streaming losses piled up, forcing the AMPTP to make a wide variety of concessions regarding residuals in the SVOD space, writers’ rooms and AI.

In the 2023 strikes, actor Bex Taylor-Klaus described to a political podcast how a company had inserted a clause in their contract for a game role that would have granted the publisher ownership of their likeness through facial scanning, causing them to agree only to a voice role. While Taylor-Klaus did not name the game or publisher, their most recent game credit at the time of the strikes was EA’s “Star Wars: Squadrons.”

EA has grown bullish on incorporating generative AI into its growth efforts, calling it the “very core” of its business in a September investor presentation. The publisher described how it wants to incorporate AI software into user-generated content on franchises including “The Sims” as well as make decades’ worth of digital assets from its games available for UGC. EA has laid off roughly 1,900 workers since the start of 2023.

SAG-AFTRA’s Crabtree-Ireland told Variety the guild doesn’t agree with publishers’ arguments that motion-capture work isn’t something game producers are capable of accounting for and sees that as “unfounded” reasoning.

“The justification that the video game bargaining group is articulating is designed to try and sound good to the public, to provide cover for creating a repository of actors and performances that they can use without informed consent or fair compensation, especially targeting actors who don’t have the individual leverage to block them,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “This is done with the clear intent to use digital replicas of performances in the future to avoid hiring the artists themselves or even securing their consent.”

EA’s biggest title of Q4, “Dragon Age: The Veilguard,” releases Oct. 31, shortly after “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.” A single-player RPG, the new “Dragon Age” arrive at a challenging time for such titles. Ubisoft’s open-world “Star Wars Outlaws” in August underperformed so significantly the publisher delayed what would have been November’s biggest release, “Assassin’s Creed Shadows,” to February 2025.

Like “Call of Duty,” “Assassin’s Creed” has seen every mainline release bow in Q4, making “Shadows” the first to stray from that strategy. Ubisoft is based in France and isn’t among the publishing group bargaining with SAG-AFTRA.

After the new “Call of Duty” and “Dragon Age” games, there aren’t many big AAA games releasing through the end of 2024, aside from Sony’s “Lego Horizon Adventures” and Microsoft Gaming publisher Bethesda’s “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle,” putting extra pressure on hardware and the usual live-service leaders to deliver strong on sales. Should the SAG-AFTRA strike continue and result in a wider boycott of the industry, major publishers might see the logic in making AI concessions sooner than later.