On November 21st, 2019, a judge ruled that Quantic Dream did not fulfill their security obligation to an ex-employee and that the developer would ultimately owe that employee €7,000. The news hit the press over the weekend. Today, Quantic Dream released a statement claiming that they only lost a small part of the lawsuit and that the majority of the ex-employees’ requests were denied.
Quantic Dream took to twitter to release their statement, which can be read in full here:
On November 21st 2019, the Labor Court of Paris rendered its verdict in a case between Quantic Dream and an ex-employee. After said ex-employee was caricatured as “Super Nanny” by a colleague, they sought compensation and damages of €114,000, in addition to the reclassifying of their resignation as unfair dismissal.
The judge rejected all of the ex-employee’s principal requests, deeming very clearly that the “Super Nanny” image did not justify their claim and that there were no deterioration of their working conditions in the company. The judge further ruled that the company management reacted appropriately, by taking all necessary measures on the day of the incident in question.
The ex-employee only obtained compensation of €5,000 (+ €2,000 in costs) in respect of a “security obligation”: althought these images were created outside of regular office hours and no complaints were made, the company should have anticipated the possibility of said images getting out of control, since they were created on company premises.
We take note of, and will not appeal, this judgment.
These facts are laid out clearly in order to prevent any misinformation or misrepresentation of the verdict.
Quantic Dream, the developer of popular adventure games such as Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, and the more recently released Detroit: Become Human, has been dealing with lawsuits since early 2018 when a report from several French outlets revealed that the company had an inappropriate working environment and NSFW pictures of their employees leaked. Shortly after the news broke, Quantic Dream responded by filing lawsuits against outlets who reported it. There are still several lawsuits ongoing, with the ex-employee still having a different lawsuit for another claim about workplace harassment, Quantic Dream suing the employee for claiming he stole internal data, and the aforementioned lawsuit against the press outlets.
[Source: Twitter]
