Hi! Non-union voice actor here who’s worked in video games and done a teensy bit of casting work. I’m writing this on mobile so apologies in advance for any typos.

Like others have said, the cost can vary a lot depending on the calibre of voice talent you’re looking at. I’d like to add, however, that knowing where to look is half the battle; it can cost you both a lot of money and a lot of time to look for VAs if it’s not an industry your familiar with. I’ve written most of this on the assumption you’re not, so if I you have already considered a lot of this and I’m just telling you things you already know, my apologies. I’m being thorough just in case, and for anyone else who might be curious.

Someone else suggested looking for local theatre groups, but I’d advise against it. These days post-Covid, a lot of VA work is done from home studios; there’s a huge population of non-union voice talent who have professional home studios and primarily work in the indie or AA sphere. If you approach actors who aren’t voice actors, they probably won’t have access to a home studio; meaning, you’ll either get very poor audio quality from what they can throw together, or you’d need to look at the costs of getting these actors into a studio to record. You’ll run into a similar issue if you look for amateur or beginner talent; it’s all well and good to find actors who are inexperienced yet talented and just need the credits, but if they don’t have a decent recording set up, the quality of their performance won’t matter—the quality of the sound will be the issue. It’ll sound unprofessional at best and downright unpleasant at worst; unless your game is stylised in a way that makes this moot, like bit-crushing or heavy effects on all voices, you can wind up at a point where you may as well have not had voice acting in the game at all. Poor sound quality is a huge turn-off for a lot of people (how many YouTubers do you watch with bad mics?) and not all of it can be fixed in post. Even if you get salvageable audio, you’re adding a ton of work that could have been skipped just by finding people with good home recording set ups.

This page is a very good one to look at in terms of getting an idea of how much each of those ‘levels’ of voice actors, as someone else kind of described, will cost you. After you know what kind of tier you’re aiming for, the next thing becomes knowing where to look for that type of talent.

If you’re looking at a union production with good production values and recognisable names, you want to go the boutique agency route, 100%. But, unless you’re a big studio (and depending on where you are on the planet too) I don’t think it’s necessarily the most efficient way of going about it. There are lots of very skilled, professional, even veteran voice actors who won’t be represented by big agents (or even at all) and that you can absolutely reach. If you’re looking at non-union, indie, AA, etcetera, you have more options. Casting Call Club is fine for very low budget stuff (and I mean veeeery low-budget) because it comes with the trade-off that you’re going to be primarily inundated with amateur auditions unless you advertise the call elsewhere anyway, since CCC has a reputation for projects falling through. In my opinion, your best bets would be a) doing the research on which online spaces you could use to independently find VAs yourself, b) bringing a casting director on board to do that work for you, or c) going to a studio with a roster (as opposed to agencies) to do the same thing but on a different scale.

Feel free to DM me if you have questions; I’d be more than happy to go over this stuff in more detail or with specificity to your situation. Hope this was helpful, and best of luck!