LogInThis will be a temporary approach to "respect the ongoing strike."
As the strike called by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) has been going on for nearly five months now and has no sign of ending anytime soon, more games have been impacted.
This time, it's Riot Games, who announced that League of Legends PC will temporarily switch to English skin VO as the strike conitinues. In their statement issued earlier this week, the developers said that in order to deliver new content, they will be "temporarily using existing (base) VO instead of recording new lines with different actors," and this will apply to English-language League PC and some Wild Rift skins, with other languages remain unaffected.
Notably, this decision will only work temporarily as an approach to "respect the ongoing strike." And that means once the strike is over, Riot games will "record new English VO and return to our usual process."
Riot Games
Riot itself is not a company that the strike directly aims at. Formosa Interactive, the company Riot uses for their US voiceover work, has been targeted by SAG-AFTRA in its action against League of Legends. However, it doesn't mean that Riot Games can do nothing about the situation.
Anairis Quinones, who voiced Kimberly in Street Fighter 6 and Mirko in the Japanese manga series My Hero Academia, among many other characters, has shared their view via social media (by the time this article is written, Quinones's Twitter account is gone; thanks PC Gamer for capturing the tweet):
"The recording studios they work with are at the behest of their client; if Riot wants to sign the interim contract that protects VAs, the studio will make it happen. If they don’t, the studios won’t. And if it’s the studio that’s going against the company’s wishes, then they would just go to another studio—and no studio wants to lose a major client like Riot."
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