Actors’ union SAG-AFTRA has been striking in protest of large gaming companies refusing to institute protections against AI to help preserve actors’ livelihoods. One more company has made the list: Formosa Interactive, an unassuming contractor you’ve likely never heard, but works on League of Legends.
To understand Formosa’s role in the industry, one must first understand that voice acting is an expensive and immensely complicated endeavor. With so many different facets requiring different skillsets, from casting to directing, foley, project integration, and 10 other things I could name, most studios simply don’t have the resources or inclination to maintain their own voice acting departments, especially if their games are not particularly focused on story. That’s where Formosa comes in, letting larger companies outsource to them to take care of these particularly tricky elements of game development. They claim clients like League and Genshin Impact, but now they’ve landed in hot water thanks to alleged labor law violations.
SAG-AFTRA claims Formosa violated labor law by allegedly attempting to cancel a game affected by the strike (the particular game remains unnamed). When the company was informed that this was not possible under current labor laws, as canceling projects in retaliation to strikes is illegal, SAG-AFTRA alleges Formosa simply moved the ongoing game to the care of a shell company and put out non-union casting calls to assemble a new cast of scabs (non-union workers specifically hired to replace unionized workers on strike) and push the project through.
SAG-AFTRA has taken this alleged surreptitious reshuffling as an attempt to undercut the ongoing strike, and has added Formosa—and by extension, its clients—to its list of struck companies. More specifically, the announcement put heavy focus on League of Legends, one of the studio’s higher-profile ongoing projects.
This is all to say, don’t be surprised if the next few League updates lack voice lines. The SAG-AFTRA strike has swept the industry, and in truth it’s a little surprising it hasn’t come knocking on League‘s door already. Granted, though, bigger games like GTA 6 have yet to be affected by the strike—reportedly because a deal was struck to make the game exempt from the strike before it went into effect.
In the midst of one of the most turbulent periods the industry has had in a while, it’s understandable that companies are looking for any means necessary to keep their halted projects going, or at least claim tax write-offs on them. When this comes at the cost of creatives and their jobs, however, the issue becomes far murkier. With any luck, the AI fascination that already seems to be crumbling under its own weight will soon be driven out of the industry for good and everyone can get back to thinking about what matters: the games.
Update Sept24 4:40pm CT: Riot Games has reached out to Dot with a statement clarifying its lack of involvement with Formosa’s alleged violations:
League of Legends has nothing to do with the complaint mentioned in SAG-AFTRA’s press release. We want to be clear: Since becoming a union project five years ago, League of Legends has only asked Formosa to engage with Union performers in the US and has never once suggested doing otherwise. In addition, we’ve never asked Formosa to cancel a game that we’ve registered. All of the allegations in SAG-AFTRA’s press release relating to canceling a game or hiring non-union talent relate to a non-Riot game, and have nothing to do with League or any of our games.
According to Riot’s statement, this controversial project was evidently an undertaking for one of Formosa’s other clients, and not Riot or League. The SAG-AFTRA response seems to be targeting League solely because it’s one of Formosa’s highest-profile projects rather than for anything Riot specifically has done. At the end of the day, Formosa is just a contractor, and Riot claims its actions in this particular case were purely its own.
