After failing to reach an agreement on new contractual terms, the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) has gone on strike from today as of 12:01AM, PDT.

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The list of companies affected by the strike include Activision, Blindlight, Corps of Discovery Films, Disney Character Voices, Formosa Interactive, Insomniac Games, Interactive Associates, Take 2, VoiceWorks Productions, and WB Games, Inc.The current deal from the above Companies offered an immediate 9 percent pay rise should SAG-AFTRA union members accept the offer by December 1.Scott J. Witlin, of the law firm of Barnes & Thornburg, who represents the interests of the Companies, offered the following statement.“We had hoped this would be successful,” said Witlin, “but union leadership left mediation without providing a counteroffer. We urged union leaders to put the package to a vote of their membership, but union leaders refused."We improved our offer to demonstrate our willingness to reach a fair, mutually-beneficial agreement after 18 months of negotiations.”The 9 percent pay rise would see a typical four-hour voice-over session and ‘on-camera day’ offer a new rate of $900 plus an additional compensation of up to $950 per game depending on the amount of sessions worked. SAG-AFTRA, however, feels the current offer doesn’t meet the union’s demands in terms of fair pay.“Despite years of concerted effort and negotiating sessions, video game employers have steadfastly refused to reach a fair deal during our contract negotiations,” SAG-AFTRA said earlier.“A last attempt to reach an agreement with video game employers was not successful. Management remains unwilling to agree to fair terms that would bring the interactive contract into the 21st century. Therefore, as of Oct. 21, 2016, SAG-AFTRA is on strike against the following video game employers with regard to all games that went into production after Feb. 17, 2015.”SAG-AFTRA argues voice actors should receive a cut of the sales for every game they work on in addition to the regular fee. While the number the union is demanding isn’t known at this point, SAG-AFTRA states the compensation would be capped and will only apply to “successful games”.The other area SAG-AFTRA is gunning for change in is for vocal stress. If you’ve ever played a Borderlands game and heard rabid bandits screaming maniacally, you’ll be familiar with what vocal stress sounds like. That said, SAG-AFTRA defines it as so: “Voice actors are routinely required to simulate painful deaths, creature voices, grunts, barks and other stressful vocalizations that can strain and damage their voices, sometimes permanently.”What SAG-AFTRA wants is for recording sessions to be just two hours in length to avoid vocal damage, but still paid at the four-hour rate.This strike has been a year in the making. In October of 2015, the union passed a referendum to determine whether to go ahead with the strike , which was met with over 96% of its members voting in favour.Before that, in September, the #PerformanceMatters hashtag began trending on Twitter following the announcement that video game voice actors could be going on strike We’ll be sure to keep updated as this story plays out.

Wesley Copeland is a freelance news writer who writes excellent bios. For more obvious statements and video game chat, you should probably follow him on Twitter