[pmoriarty]

"Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie."

Are voice acting costs that huge?

It's not like video games have to shell out millions to get name-brand actors to star in their cut scenes. It's usually unknowns or has-beens who stoop to doing video game work. How expensive can that be?

[jrimbault]

From what I know, talent is usually cheap enough relative to the total cost of a game, it's the whole pipeline around integrating voice acting and motion capture into a game that's really expensive. In this[1] episode of that podcast they talk a bit about the costs around that. If you decide to do voice acting and motion capture you also have to adapt the whole game and writing around that decision, which balloons costs a lot since you've decided you want _that kind of game_.

[1]: https://youtu.be/cTejdjnf-jI with Mike Bithel dev of "Thomas was Alone", Troy Baker celebrity video game voice actor, Austin Wintory composer (Journey), Alanah Pearce writer

[ComputerGuru]

Cheap enough that you can get them on fivr

[wayoutthere]

Not the good ones. There are definitely top-tier voice actors out there who command good salaries. The ones on fivr are for like, recording audio books or radio commercials.