Employee reactions
As mentioned, I spoke with 16 members of Quantic Dream’s staff. I talked with a large group over a video conference, and I also spoke with several over Skype calls. I did not visit the company in Paris, though I was invited to do so. I had permission to speak with employees from the company leadership, and I spoke with one employee in an interview that wasn’t arranged by the company.
In a group discussion, employees said they felt the stories were off base and they hurt the reputation of the company, making it harder to recruit people in the competitive industry. Some of the employees — including some who worked at the company for decades — were surprised, “shocked,” and indignant about the media coverage. They said the stories were “bullshit.” One father said he was distressed when his teenage children read the story and said, “Oh, Daddy, you are working in a toxic company?”
The employees said that if there was a need for overtime, the company was open about it and discussed it in detail, as French law is very strict when it comes to overtime work and paying for it.
“We tried to stay positive in the shitstorm” of media coverage, said one employee. “You become depressed. We are passionate about making games.”
Adam Williams, lead writer at Quantic Dream, started at the company about four years ago on the Detroit: Become Human project. He worked remotely at first and then relocated to Paris to work with the team. He sat across from Cage, and found him and de Foundamiere to be very kind. Cage helped with relocation, and he even taught Williams how to ride a bike.
“I remember the allegations of a toxic culture ahead of Detroit’s release,” Williams said in our interview. “But it wasn’t exactly clear what the nature of those transgressions were. David was really racking his brains to think about where these allegations could come from. The timing was strange, as the allegations were ramping up as the publicity of Detroit was ramping up.”
He added, “When I found out the photo montage was at the center of it, I could not remember people who were offended by them.”
Williams said he has sisters himself and is particularly sensitive to stories he has heard about harassment in other industries.
“The idea that allegations like that might be used cynically by a member of the media was quite upsetting to me,” Williams said. “It makes it harder for people who have really gone through these things to get the correct level of attention and be taken as seriously as they should be.”
He was offended at the notion there might be a code of silence in management about talking about harassment or toxicity.
“The idea that we as a group would be craven enough not to speak out about something like that if we had seen it felt slanderous to me,” Williams said. “As time went on, we moved from a genuine concern about what might be happening to a creeping sense that maybe we were the target of the stories rather than these being genuine investigations by the media. As time went on, I started to feel that it was actually that we had build up animosity among some journalists and sections of the games media. We realized there was nothing to be found.”
He noted how there are a lot of women on staff and a number of them are in senior roles. And Williams knew that Cage was motivated to write the story of Detroit because he “wanted to talk about how people can be treated like second-class citizens.”
Williams said that getting a chance to talk about this whole issue of a toxic culture was therapeutic for him, as it was hard not to be able to talk about his views of perception and reality.
“I honestly believe that a lot of people who are involved in this feel that because the cause is a good one — that we should defend vulnerable employers from sinister workplace situations — that those in the media doing the investigating felt like the ends justify the means,” Williams said. “Even if they can’t prove something, and even if they haven’t got the right people or the right facts, it’s kind of OK. Because what they are doing is noble and they have this oral license.”
He and others noted that employees in France are very well protected by the law, and it’s hard for employers to win any fights against the word of employees. The fact that the Labor Court did not take the side of employees who were complaining said a lot, Williams said.
Lisa Pendse, vice president of marketing in the publishing division at Quantic Dream, concurred and said her experience in the past year has been good. When she was interviewing for her job, she asked about the allegations of a toxic culture. She said that she had other opportunities and it gave her a lot of pause.
But she decided after talking with the company for a long time that she would take the job, and it turned out to be a great decision, she said. She noticed how many women were in leadership roles on staff, and she felt all perspectives were listened to at the company.
“I asked Guillaume about the allegations against the studio in my very first interview, and he was really honest with me about the reality of life in the studio,” she said. “I feel I took a risk in coming here because of what I had read about the studio. But I decided to trust my own gut instinct, and every day of my life I am so thankful.”
Looking back
As to why this happened to Quantic Dream, Cage said the company was “a little bit naïve about all this.”
Cage said, “We always trusted and considered our employees a lot, and we never anticipated that any of them could lie in order to receive a payout. We know that most journalists are fair and honest, but we should have also anticipated that it only takes one to share and spread false news. We were certainly not cautious enough to protect our company and our employees against these risks. We are now.”
He added, “Like unfortunately more and more game studios these days, it is also true that we have some haters on the internet who hate our studio because we do games that they don’t like. We don’t make games based on violence, but we create emotional stories based on human relationships and storytelling. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, which I totally understand, but there are also millions of fans around the world who love the genre and our work in particular.”
And he said, “There are also people who don’t like my ideas about the need for the industry to propose more varied and mature experiences, to focus more on emotion and meaning than on violence. This position apparently also generated a lot of anger with some people. I don’t pretend to please everyone, and if my games and ideas are that troubling to some, it means that they are interesting. I am not going to change what I believe in, no matter what some people will invent in order to justify their own anger and frustration.”
The impact on Quantic Dream
Cage said that the controversy has not had a negative impact on the team, which has stayed together. Detroit: Become Human was also a commercial success. Cage said, “Fans also fully support Detroit and send us messages of love every day. We receive literally thousands of messages, fan art, pictures of cosplay, and incredibly moving messages. We get a wonderful reception wherever we go on the planet, and this is really amazing.”
The company also received a big investment from China’s NetEase to fund multiple games on multiple platforms. The company has built a new motion capture studio, new sound studios, new offices, and a common area for employees while working on new game concepts and next-generation technology. Over the course of a long relationship, Sony did not sever ties over issues related to a toxic culture. And NetEase presumably did its own investigation of Quantic Dream before investing in the company last year.
“Our team has never been so united. Nothing would be possible without their passion, talent and involvement in Quantic Dream. I am extremely proud of this team and of what we have built together over the past 22 years,” Cage said. “This story shows that we should all be very concerned about how information can easily be manipulated, but also about how politics gets into video games. Quantic Dream doesn’t do politics, but we refuse to be instrumentalized by people who use our notoriety to promote their political agenda or sell their articles. We should also be very respectful of the voice of the real victims, people who are really facing situations where they are mentally or physically in peril. People inventing or relaying fake stories like ours should understand that they don’t help the industry nor the real victims.”
He added, “On our end, we will continue to explore our vision of interactivity, to create experiences that are different, to collaborate with the best talents in the world, and to develop emotional and meaningful experiences. We will keep working as a team, with the same passion and pleasure to work together, we will keep imagining, laughing, arguing, dreaming, surprising ourselves, promoting humanist values while sharing our passion with our wonderful community of fans around the world.”