Rest easy: GTA 6 won’t be delayed because of the recent game actors’ strike, a spokesperson has confirmed to Kotaku.
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Last night, the SAG-AFTRA union advised all game actors to go on strike due to concerns with AI. Unionized performers across all disciplines–motion capture, stunt people, and voice-over artists–are now on strike until proper resolutions can be made with billion-dollar publishers like Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Take-Two Interactive. This will have an immediate effect on in-production games and could lead to heavy delays at a time when the industry is already struggling.
Luckily, Grand Theft Auto 6 is not among the impacted projects. That’s despite Take-Two, the parent company of GTA 6 developer Rockstar Games, being involved in the ongoing negotiations. “I can confirm GTA VI is exempt,” Audrey Cooling, a spokesperson representing the game producers, told Kotaku.
Cooling also confirmed that any project that had been in development before September 2023 is exempt and will not be affected by the strike.
SAG-AFTRA called for the strike in an effort to lay down clear and acceptable protections for game actors against AI recreations. It’s believed that developers and publishers are using nebulous language that could lead to AI “scraping” their performances, and ultimately re-creating voices and motion capture movements without hiring the talent–in other words, AI could ultimately replace these critical jobs in the $180 billion interactive entertainment industry.
Rockstar Games has yet to confirm the voice and motion capture actors that will star in Grand Theft Auto 6, so there was a chance that non-union talent had already been used, and therefor GTA 6 wouldn’t have been affected by the strike in any case.
The news is welcome for fans and the games industry at large. GTA 6 is expected to help catalyze the somewhat-stagnant games industry and help boost both hardware and software sales in the console market. The phrase “survive till 25” has been passed around among game devs–and it just so happens that GTA 6 is set to release sometime in 2025.