Voice Acting for Video Games and Anime

More people want to voice anime and video game characters than want any other kind of voice work. It is not close. And almost none of them know that the streaming service whose logo they associate with the show is not the company that hires the cast.

English anime dubbing is a regional, relationship-driven, studio-run business. It happens in a small number of buildings, in a small number of cities, and the people who cast it work from a database of actors they already know. That is not a conspiracy. It is just how it is built. But it means the standard beginner plan — record a demo, email the streamer — is not a long shot. It is a category error.

And the money is worse than you think. Considerably worse.

Who actually hires an English anime dub

Not Crunchyroll's marketing department. The dubbing studios. Funimation merged into Crunchyroll in March 2022 — both are Sony, and Crunchyroll is now described as the largest and most powerful anime company outside Japan. But the recording work is done by studios: Crunchyroll and Funimation in-house, largely in Texas. Bang Zoom! Entertainment in Los Angeles. Sound Cadence Studios in Addison, Texas. NYAV Post in New York and LA. Sentai Studios in Houston. Netflix works through its own vendor list under the Netflix Post Partner Program.

Look at that geography and say it out loud. Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, New York. That is the map. Mami Okada, casting director at Bang Zoom!, has said it directly: if actors want to break into anime, she highly recommends physically being in the locations where anime is done — currently the majority of it in Los Angeles and Texas.

And the casting itself? Okada describes it plainly. Once a project is greenlit, she lists up 10 to 20 actors per role from the studio's talent database and requests auditions from them. That is the audition list. It is drawn from people already in the database. The audition is not the gate. Being in the database is the gate.

Sentai Filmworks says the quiet part out loud on its own public FAQ: at this time, Sentai does not hold auditions to cast its anime English dubs. Its voice actors work as actors for a living — trained professionals with backgrounds in theatre, TV and film, active and established members of the performing arts community. That is a company telling you, in writing, that there is no public door.

What the dream job actually pays

Anime dubbing in the United States is historically and largely non-union, produced in Texas — a right-to-work state, which strips SAG-AFTRA of its main leverage. GKIDS and Aniplex produce some union dubs. Netflix is all-union. Crunchyroll and Funimation dubs are largely not, and when asked about union policy, Crunchyroll declined to comment.

Now the number. From Anime News Network's 2022 investigation into union anime dubs — still the best reporting that exists on this, and nothing as rigorous has replaced it, so date it in your head as the last confirmed state of play, 2022:

Sit with that before you spend three thousand dollars on a demo aimed at it.

Video games: better money, and one enormous catch

Games are a different economy, and a considerably healthier one. Under the pre-strike contract, a Day Performer's four-hour day covering up to three voices paid $1,102; a single voice on a one-hour session paid $551, with $367.50 for each additional voice. The 2025 Interactive Media Agreement, ratified 95.04% to 4.96%, raised compensation by 15.17% on ratification, plus 3% in each of November 2025, 2026 and 2027. Session bonuses for sessions seven through ten went from $275 to $285 each, with $2,100 in total additional compensation after ten sessions, due no later than the game's release. Pension and health went from 16.5% to 17%, rising to 17.5% on 31 October 2026.

A post-strike rate card with the recalculated dollar figures has not been published anywhere we could find. So treat this as derived, not quoted: roughly $1,270 for a four-hour day, on the pre-strike $1,102 plus the confirmed 15.17% increase.

Here is the catch, and it is the single most important structural fact about video game voice work. Games have no residuals. You are paid for the session. That is it. Forever.

What the strike actually won

Video game performers struck on 26 July 2024. A tentative deal came on 9 June 2025, the strike was suspended on 11 June 2025, and the agreement was ratified that July. Eleven months without work. This is what it bought, and it is worth knowing precisely, because it is the strongest set of AI protections any performer has anywhere:

Consent to a digital replica must be written, clear and conspicuous, and separately signed or initialled — it cannot be buried in boilerplate. Compensation is a minimum of one session fee per 300 generated lines. Real-Time Generation — a live AI version of you improvising dialogue inside a game — pays no less than 750% of applicable minimum scale, per replica, per game. If a studio prompts a generative system with a performer's name, the output automatically counts as a digital replica requiring consent. There is a specialised AI arbitration panel, and usage reports are required within 90 days of release.

And the clause that tells you what the fight was really about: consent is automatically suspended during a strike. Voice actors went out for eleven months and won the right to not be replaced by themselves on a picket line. Note also which category the union priced highest — 750% of scale for Real-Time Generation. That is the union telling you, in dollars, which work it believes is hardest to automate.

The honest path in

It is not recording a demo and emailing Crunchyroll. Nobody at Crunchyroll is waiting for that email, and Sentai has published a page explaining that they are not.

Video game casting runs through studios like Formosa Interactive and PCB Productions, and the pathway is agent-submission-based — actors receive sides from their agent, not from a public call. NDAs are standard and cover the title, the character, your castmates and the release date. So the real first move for games is the same unglamorous one as for animation: get good enough to get an agent.

The genuinely open door is indie games, which are reachable through direct outreach and the #gamedev community, and which is where a great many working game actors got their first credits. For anime, the honest answer is Okada's: be where the work is, be an actor first, and be patient. Her own advice to newcomers is worth quoting exactly — you are stepping into one of the most competitive fields in the industry, be patient, and be ready for the fact that you will not be living from voice acting professionally for at least a few years.

That is a casting director telling you to plan for years of not earning from this. She is not being cruel. She is being useful, which is rarer. If you want this, treat it as a craft you are building over a decade, in one of four cities, alongside a job that pays your rent — and let the fantasy version go. The fantasy version is the one that costs people money.