But the journalists said they were being fair. The articles recounted the IT manager’s story, and they also mentioned the other issues at Quantic Dream.
“In this first piece, Mediapart tackled the issue of the edited pictures, but also a lot of other things: the crunch culture and the way a lot of employees were discouraged and exhausted; the fact that some former employees didn’t like working with Quantic Dream; some suspicious administrative customs (in particular regarding the relationships between Quantic Dream and the national unemployment agency),” Israel said.
But Cage said he believed the journalists didn’t understand the way game companies worked, nor the tight controls that the company was required to meet.
“We were really surprised, because we are very strict about the company’s management,” Cage said. “We have internal and external accountants, lawyers, administrators and shareholders, and doing anything illegal in a small company like ours would be hard to hide. We seriously investigated internally again and questioned third parties to understand if we had done anything wrong, but again we couldn’t find anything.”
Cage said three different authorities backed up the company. These included a Tax Control audit in 2018, which was a complete audit from three major audit companies, one American and two French, who did due diligence about the company in the context of an investment from a company listed on NASDAQ. And it also included a government body (called “URSSAF”), which sent two people onsite for three weeks to check all the employees and directors’ contracts, salaries, taxes, financial accounts, and transactions — including the contract and transaction of the director that was described as illegal in an article.
“All these independent institutions reported that the company was very well managed, that it respected the law in all aspects, and that they had no issues to report,” Cage said.
After video game news site CanardPC, French newspaper Le Monde, and the investigative news site Mediapart published articles on Quantic Dream, the company fired back with defamation lawsuits against Le Monde and Mediapart (Quantic Dream chose not to sue CanardPC, as it appeared to be a much smaller publication).
“We knew that these articles were a complete fabrication, and that was unacceptable. This is why we decided to sue the journalists for defamation,” Cage said.
Regarding the third-party audits, Dan Israel, one of the Mediapart writers, responded, “We asked a lot of questions on these issues. If David Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumière had shared these explanations with us, we would have quoted them on that. They did not: They only explained that there was an audit that did complete due diligence about the company, and that everything was deemed legal. We included this comment in our article. We were meticulous in including all the answers they gave us on these important matters.”
In response to a query from GamesBeat, journalist William Audereau, author of the Le Monde article, said in an email, “Our investigation spanned over three months. I consulted extensive internal documentation, talked with around 20 former or current employees, including some very high profile, who all confirmed the stories. While investigating on their own, Mediapart (a major French investigation website) and CanardPC (one of the most independent video game outlets) reached the same conclusions. Quantic Dream calling it ‘falsehoods’ or a ‘sensationalized story’ sounds like another awkward PR spin from the company, and this is a pity for people who suffered, and for some of them still suffer from what they described as a toxic workplace.”
Labor court battle
The IT manager’s complaint with the Labor Court worked its way through the system. The Labor Court is an institution in France where any employee who has a complaint against an employer can request a hearing. A judge analyzes the evidence and renders a judgment. Both parties can hire legal defense, provide evidence, and argue the case.
Cage said that in 22 years, with more than 1,000 employees employed over that history, Quantic Dream has had only three cases brought to the Labor Court. It lost one of those cases, unrelated to this one. This, Cage said, shows that issues with employees are extremely rare at Quantic Dream.
The first hearing took place in 2018, but the judges in the case could not come to a decision. In a second hearing in 2019, the judge ruled that the plaintiff “did not provide evidence of a deterioration of working conditions within the company, […] and the production of press articles […] were insufficient to establish these facts.”
The IT manager asked for €115,000 ($128,215) and the reclassifying of his resignation into unjustified dismissal (in France, a dismissal has to be justified on very serious grounds, otherwise the employee is entitled to significant compensation).
The judge rejected the IT manager’s request for compensation and ruled that the IT manager had voluntarily resigned. The company believed that the threat to tell the press unless the employee was fired was “totally unacceptable.” The judge also rendered similar verdicts for two other employees from the IT team, and a third case is under appeal. In the two other cases, the judge ruled that the employees were “instrumentalized by others” in hopes of getting higher compensation, Cage said.
Israel said that is not a correct interpretation of the court’s ruling. Translated from the French, the court’s wording included, “It is permitted to wonder whether he wasn’t instrumentalized by others or would not have thought he could benefit from a windfall effect to obtain a much higher financial compensation.” This language was included in the dismissal of the IT manager’s claim.
“To give context to these verdicts, it is worth noting that a few weeks before the incident, these employees had their annual interviews with their lead, the IT manager, in which they reported how happy they were in the company and what a pleasant working atmosphere there was,” Cage said. “These documents among other evidence convinced judges that this story of ‘toxic atmosphere’ was only made up to ask for compensation.”
Quantic Dream had to pay the IT manager compensation of €5,000 ($5,572) because the court ruled that the company should have anticipated the potential risk of an employee editing pictures and should have prohibited this activity from the start. Cage claims that the French journalists twisted the meaning of the ruling, interpreting it as a loss for the company. That tone carried over into international articles, like this one in Variety, with the headline, “Detroit Developer Quantic Dream Loses Court Case Over Harassment.” The French journalists in particular continue to interpret this outcome as a victory for the plaintiffs.
“Anyone who reads the verdict can see that this is utterly misleading, but their version was the one that some people wanted to hear, so they just interpreted the court’s findings in order to serve their own editorial appetite,” Cage said.
He said the court noted, “Contrary to what the employee claims, there is no evidence of a deterioration in working conditions within the company.”
Another French journalist who was not connected to the published stories sided with Cage and Quantic Dream. Vincent Jolly, senior reporter at Le Figaro magazine, told me in an email (and speaking only for himself) that he did some reporting on the case and chose not to write a story about allegations of a toxic culture.
Jolly added, “Having covered Quantic Dream frequently in the past years and knowing some of the employees myself, I just don’t see unbiased evidence that would support the claim of the investigations. There is no smoking gun. There is, from my point of view, just no story here.”
The media defamation lawsuits
The defamation lawsuits continue, but on a much slower pace than the Labor Court. The recent labor riots forced a rescheduling of the first hearing until May 2021.
The company is impatient to clear its name, and it says its employees are as well.
Cage said, “It is also interesting to note that although many people talk about what happens inside Quantic Dream, absolutely no one tried to talk to our employees. Some people have the image of game studios where employees are treated disrespectfully, are humiliated and exploited, but this is not our case. Most of our employees are between 30 and 50 years old; they have families; they are very talented veterans in the industry; and none of them would accept to stay in a company that is ‘toxic,’ especially when they can easily find work in the best triple-A studios in the world. Anyone analyzing the facts would have come to the same conclusion — that this whole story doesn’t reflect the evidence provided.”
Audereau, the journalist from Le Monde, responded, “As for the outcome of the Labor Court: Court described the pictures as ‘homophobic, misogynistic, racist, or highly vulgar’ and fined Quantic Dream for having failed to their ‘duty of security’ toward their employees, which is, to my knowledge, very rare. Using a very obscure and risky point of the French labor law, the ‘prise d’acte,’ the employee asked for [the] resignation to be requalified as a termination, but the court didn’t agree on that. Hence he didn’t obtain the amount of damages and interests he was asking for, and appealed against the ruling.”
Regarding the pending lawsuits, Cage said that both sides have been asked to share evidence in the case. He said Quantic Dream has testimony from 40 current and former employees, with “numerous messages of support that team members spontaneously sent when the articles were published.” The company also included as evidence the full independent HR audit of the team, the results of all the financial and social audits and controls, and “many other documents supporting very consistently that Quantic Dream is a well-managed company where employees are appreciated and respected.”
Cage also said that the judge in the case said, “The photomontage showing [the IT manager] in Supernanny, if it appears vulgar, is neither homophobic, nor racist, nor pornographic.”
Mediapart’s Israel said, “David Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumière are of course entitled to their opinion. Which is why we interviewed them and quoted them extensively on this issue (among others) in our article. If you read our piece, you’ll see that we let them a lot of room to express themselves. It is our standard process at Mediapart.”
Cage said that evidence supplied by Mediapart was scant. Quantic Dream said the judge in the case limited witnesses, so the company will call five witnesses on its behalf instead of the 50 who are prepared to testify. Mediapart and Pixel/Le Monde had four witnesses, including the three journalists who wrote the articles.
“We cannot comment on the issue of our sources, as you will understand, but we had far more than one source,” Israel of Mediapart said. Israel added, “The four witnesses Quantic Dream is talking about are the ones that were subpoenaed to the hearing that was supposed to be held on December 5 and 6. In addition to those, we have provided four other written testimonies, that are considered just as important by the French law. And our five witnesses are ex-employees, even the union representative. Moreover, as you may have guessed, a lot of our witnesses wished to stay anonymous, and didn’t want to testify in their own names. We couldn’t reveal their identities to the court.”
Regarding the delay in the defamation lawsuit, Cage said it is “extremely frustrating, because this hearing would have clarified everything about these allegations.” Cage said the company decided to speak up now rather than wait because the company needed to answer attacks on social media, as its employees who have spoken up were “bullied, caricatured as ‘traitors to the employees’ cause’ and even threated [sic] with death.”
He added, “They just said they were not victims of anything, which was totally unacceptable to some. What is absolutely astonishing is how people from the outside are eager to save people who are humiliated and discriminated against even when there are none.”
As to addressing the allegations of a toxic workplace, Cage said, “We faced our responsibilities and took these allegations very seriously. So we investigated internally to see if there was anything wrong in the company. We started a full internal audit, we conducted interviews of everyone in the studio, we even invited people to complain anonymously if they wanted to, and we called dozens of ex-employees. No one reported anything.”
He added, “Then we hired a third-party company called People Vox, which specializes in audits of human resources (they work with many major companies in France). They asked 74 questions about the working conditions that employees answered anonymously through their platform. The result is absolutely clear: 96% of the responses mentioned the good atmosphere in the studio as what they liked the most about the company, 94% said they were particularly proud of working at Quantic Dream, 96% said they trusted the management, and the “satisfaction grade” of the company reached 94%. People Vox never saw these kinds of figures in any company before.”
He also said, “At Quantic Dream, we offer competitive salaries to our employees, 50% of our managers are women, employees were granted 10% of the company shares for free, we have people of all origins, sexual orientation and backgrounds, we support humanist values and we do everything we can to offer pleasant working conditions to all. Anyone who would have seriously investigated would have seen these facts and realized the truth.”
But Israel of Mediapart said, “Considering our article about Quantic Dream (like every article published by Mediapart), we are very confident that we will win this case. We did our job and followed professional standards. Unfortunately, the outcome will only be in a long time.”