When I saw that Dave Gilbert mentioned a base fee of about $15,000 for an average length voicing at his studio I thought it was expensive but, after going through the process, even in just a QA Consultant kinda role, I can see why it would cost a lot of money to get the level of quality that WadgetEye achieves.
It's really hard!
I can 100% confirm this expensive, shameful situation. One added fun part to game design is if you're doing the *entire* thing online - testers, coders, voice artists, musician etc. - and you're VA's are all using different studios of varying quality. Most of editing is organising voice clips, processing them (Audition->Remove Sound), saving as multiple formats (everything I have is 16bit 44.1k WAVs, but the game uses OGG's), running Rhubarb over the sound file (this is the utility which generates the lipsync data - and Snarky's custom-made
TotalLipSync which runs it) using a .bat file, sending off the sound files to an engineer to get further processing and levelling/normalisation, recording every line in a spreadsheet, describing in detail what you'd like a re-take to sound like and peppering the script with [sad] [happy] [a stage direction] etc, occasionally needing to ask the VA to re-record the *entire script* because it was set to the wrong gain level or whatever, etc.etc.etc.etc.etc. and then you're done.
It's a budget job, and requires you to have experience in many areas (Photoshop, audio engineering etc.), but it's tremendously rewarding. I'd say I've produced music and VO quality on parr with eg. Kathy Rain (WadgitEye), but at a 100th the price. No hiss, no sharp edges, great acting and voices.
...and for only AU$24k! :p
My main character cost about AU$17k, which is for about 2,000 lines, retakes, lines not used, etc.
Most of the others are quite cheap, 100-1000 AUD, but it takes a huge amount of work to find talented VA's - they either 'have it' or don't. Some are actors; aaaaand then some are semi-professional narrators who can do voices. My secret is to pay a little bit extra. Check out:
http://voiceacting.boards.net/, it's one of the best place I've found 'hungry', amateur VA's; 'naturalistic' actors (as George Lucas put it) like Mark Hamill. You find the next big thing before it's even a thing

Another good way is to put your game on Kickstarter - that's how I met both my musician and female lead VA, as they advertised to prospective employers.
Anyway, where was I?
PM me if you'd like further advice or news on what involved in the steepest learning curve i've ever been up
