Voice Actors for Games Deserve Royalties Too?

While purusing through Slashdot today (groaning at all the anti-MS, pro-linux propoganda like I normally do) I came across an interesting article that they linked from the NY Times.

The basic jist of the article is that the primary voice actor for GTA 4 (Michael Hollick) is worried that his union isn't fighting for his rights enough to get residuals/royalties on work that voice actors do for games. For the record he was simply paid $100,000 for his time in the voice studio.

Now I am not writing this to debate whether or not he should get royalties, personally I think he should since he did contribute to the product. My primary conern is just how much should a voice actor get when their contribution is fairly insignificant in comparison to the work a programmer, artist, designer/producer, QA, etc. does actually making the game. Remember that GTA 4 was probably about 2 years worth of team each and probably a few hundred man-years worth of work in total.

While I am unsure what rates these developers of GTA 4 are getting for royalties (and certainly hope they are getting some at all), I certainly do believe that the they should get a much significantly higher rate than a voice actor. After all it is their constant hard work that actually makes the game so great. Sure voice acting is cool and it helps augment the personalities that the developers have given the assets in the world, but the game would still be great even if players had to conversations that the characters have as text on the screen.