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The real voice of GTA IV star Niko Bellic only made $100,000

Michael Hollick never thought his big break would come in a video game, but it did and he didn't make millions. Mr. Hollick was paid about $100,000 over roughly 15 months between late 2006 and early this year for all of his voice acting and motion-capture work on the game, with zero royalties or residuals in sight, he said. The article doesn't state how many hours he worked, but $100,000 doesn't seem like he got ripped off. The guild-negotiated rate for actors is around $730 a day. Mr. Hollick said he had been paid about 50 percent more than the standard rate, or about $1,050 a day. That means he made $100,000 in just 95 days! If those were 8 hour days he was making ~$131 an hour! If you don't have Grand Theft Auto IV for the game is awesome and you can snag it for $51.99 on the XBox 360 or $56.99 on the Playstation 3.

“Obviously I’m incredibly thankful to Rockstar for the opportunity to be in this game when I was just a nobody, an unknown quantity,” Mr. Hollick, 35, said last week over dinner in Willamsburg, Brooklyn, shortly after performing in the aerial theater show “Fuerzabruta” in Union Square. “But it’s tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don’t see any of it. I don’t blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games. Yes, the technology is important, but it’s the human performances within them that people really connect to, and I hope actors will get more respect for the work they do within those technologies.”

New York Times Technology News

Posted by | Wed, May 28, 2008 - 06:11 AM