Michael Hollick, the voice of Niko Bellic, complained to the New York Times that he, as a complete unknown, “only” made about $100,000 for the 15 months work he did on Grand Theft Auto 4.

This is pretty cut and dry as I see it. He knew how much he was going to make. If it wasn’t enough, he shouldn’t have waited until after the game set records (which everybody in the industry knew it would) before complaining about it. He should have just refused to do it and let someone else become famous from playing this role.

“Obviously I’m incredibly thankful to Rockstar for the opportunity to be in this game when I was just a nobody, an unknown quantity,” Mr. Hollick, 35, said last week over dinner in Willamsburg, Brooklyn, shortly after performing in the aerial theater show “Fuerzabruta” in Union Square. “But it’s tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don’t see any of it. I don’t blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games. Yes, the technology is important, but it’s the human performances within them that people really connect to, and I hope actors will get more respect for the work they do within those technologies.”

The issue is that equal pay be given for equal work. I’ve got an idea. How about they pay him the same as he would have made while tending bar or spraying perfume at Bloomingdale’s?

“For instance, our contracts say nothing about the use of voices for promotional purposes over the Internet,” Mr. Hollick said. “The first G.T.A. IV trailer generated something like 40 million hits online, and that’s my voice all over it, and I get nothing. If that were a radio spot, I would have. Same thing for the TV ads. I recorded those lines for the game, but now they’re all over television. It’s another gray area.”

“What drives video games is not Tracy and Hepburn; what drives it is the conception of the creative director,” said Ezra J. Doner, a former Hollywood executive who represents entertainment companies as a lawyer at Herrick, Feinstein in Manhattan, N.Y. “The actor whose appearance or voice is used is more analogous to a session music for a band. The session musicians don’t get residuals on the sales of the CD. They get paid a session fee. It’s not like the star quality of Tom Cruise that’s getting people to buy that video game.”

The general rate is $730/day. Hollick was paid $1050/day, or 43% more.

Mr. Hollick said he “asked about residuals when we negotiated, but I was told that was not a possibility.” And that’s about all we really need to know about this issue.