For a typical MMORPG, we are talking about 100,000 minutes of dialog to voice. According to Interactive Voices, Inc, one of the largest VO management groups in the US, the going rate is $100 per minute of recorded dialog. That's $10 million to record.
To be fair,
that rate is the maximum rate based on ad hoc recording needs. Yeah, if you only need one minute of voice recording, that's what they'd charge. It also notes "...or $1500 for a 45-minute recording," or $33 per minute. Like most things, the more you need, the cheaper it is.
In the case of most video games, I strongly suspect that the work is contracted by the job, not by the minute, although based on some reasonable expectation of how long the actual dialogue is. Think of it as the difference between taking a taxi if you just need to travel a few miles down the road in a pinch, versus renting a car for the day if you have extended travel plans over a longer period of time.
The $10 million figure is ludicrous, and without some kind of detailed accounting, you'll never convince me that it would cost that much for even the most expensive voice actors to do voice-over for a triple-A game title. For that amount, to extend the analogy, you could just buy a car--or in this case, hire on a full-time cast of voice actors to do as much recording as you want, whenever you want. Seriously, an average voice actor makes around $50k per year, and even if you double that to account for insurance, taxes, etc., you'd be able to maintain a staff of 100 full-time voice actors.
"Oh, but that's not including studio time!" Okay, an average rate for professional studio time is around $200 or $300 per hour, call it an even $250, and that includes the sound engineer. That would cost you around $500k per year, or the salaries of 5 of your full-time voice actors (remember, their total compensation plus taxes was doubled for this example), so you'd only be able to maintain a staff of 95 full-time voice actors, including studio time and a sound engineer, for $10 million.
In reality, it wouldn't cost nearly that much. For one thing, if you contract voice actors from a company like Interactive Voices, they supply all of the equipment and expertise to do the recording. You just need to supply the script and do any post-production necessary, which probably won't be much once they give you the finished product. Second of all, like I said above, $100 is a maximum rate based on ad hoc recording needs; the cost of a full job such as what would be required for a game would be much, MUCH less, and likely could be negotiated as a whole project instead of a per-hour or certainly a per-minute deal.
Third of all, this is assuming that you want to go the route of using a company such as Interactive Voices. One of the advantages of a project such as City of Titans is that we have a community to draw upon here that could do the work. Not that they shouldn't be compensated, but I daresay that most people in this community would probably be willing to do the work for much, much less than even the cheapest rate quoted by a professional voice services company.
In short, if you don't like voice-over, there's nothing wrong with saying, "I don't like voice-over." Some folks will disagree, but you know, thems the breaks, as a developer you have to get used to that. But holy crap, man, don't try to justify such a position by quoting some outrageously exaggerated cost for having it. Some of the times when I was most irritated at Paragon Studios was when I felt like they just didn't want to do something and tried to handwave it off and shut people down by saying it was "too expensive" or had vague "legal issues". I'd like to break that culture. And with a topic such a voice-over, which could easily be turned off by a click of an option by someone who doesn't like it, I don't see what the downside would be; it should at least be a fair topic of discussion without resorting to, "It would cost $10 million..."
Also, 100k hours? Geez, man, even that's split across seven languages, that's 10 days straight of dialogue without stopping. An average audio book is 15 hours long; a game with 10 days straight of dialogue would be around 16 read novels long.
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying that number either, even if that's supposed to account for retakes and whatnot.
