Photo: Chris Yunker under CC 2.0 License
Since 2018, Riot Games has been embroiled in a lawsuit. The women at the company had strong allegations of gender-based discrimination. A report from Kotaku shed light on the toxic situation. Early in 2020, Riot Games tried to reach a completely inadequate $10 million settlement. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) stepped in. They managed to increase the amount Riot Games owed their victims tenfold, $100 million. It likely still isn’t enough.
But it’s a start.
Riot Games, makers of League of Legends—a game with an incredibly toxic reputation—as well as surprisingly fantastic TV shows like Arcane, has a sordid history. As it turns out, the toxic environment of League of Legends may have been the product of a toxic working environment. After all, game companies could easily clean up their online interactions, if they wanted to. Unfortunately, they don’t.
At Riot, women were reportedly not seriously considered for positions and they faced discrimination for promotions and wages. Employees claim others openly made rape jokes in company-wide meetings and shouted homophobic and racist slurs in the office. In order to “cheer up” employees, Riot brought in sexy female cosplayers. Riot also apparently had a strange culture of grabbing each other’s genitals and farting on each other.
Before Blizzard, we knew Riot as the worst of the worst in gaming.
Protests didn’t change things at Riot, and continued for some time. The company tried to settle for an amount that would eventually be only half the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Now they’re facing a $100 million settlement. But why isn’t that enough?
Well, for one, the DFEH wanted four times that.
The $100 Million Settlement
Banner from Riot
The 2018 lawsuit is finally wrapping up. It involves an $80 million payout to people who worked for Riot Games since 2014 who identify as female. The remaining $20 million will go to legal fees and other costs associated with the payout and settlement. As part of the settlement, a third party will monitor Riot’s pay and promotion practices for the next three years, reporting their findings back to California’s DFEH. Riot says they’ll also set up an internal diversity and inclusion group.
This $100 million represents one of the largest settlements of its kind. $100 million sounds like an unfathomably high amount to most people, but to one of gaming’s biggest players, it’s spare change. Riot’s most popular game, League of Legends, pulled in $1.75 billion in 2020 alone. Riot’s mobile games pulled in $100 million in 2021. The company also has other games, like the popular shooter Valorant. Riot also has an actual, and apparently quite good, K-Pop group, multiple upcoming games based on the League of Legends universe, and Arcane, a hit Netflix show with rave reviews (100% on the Tomatometer). Furthermore, the company is owned by Tencent, a Chinese internet and gaming giant that owns pieces of other companies, like Epic.
Basically? Riot’s not short for cash. $100 million isn’t very much, especially when you consider how many years this lawsuit has been going on for and how many more it’ll take for the full payout.
How Much for Each Employee?
As a class-action lawsuit, every woman who worked for Riot, either full time or as a contractor, will be able to claim a piece of that $80 million settlement. By some reports, this comes to about 2,365 employees splitting that $80 million. If every one of them claims their settlement, that means about $33,826 and change for each employee. That might sound like a nice payout, but the wage gap at Riot could have been larger than that. Women denied promotions, paid less from day one, and refused pay increases potentially made at least $30,000 less than a man at the company with the same job and experience the company after just one year. This went on for years, going back to 2014, and also involved harassment and unfair practices, like ignoring women’s contributions entirely. If the DFEH had gotten their way, and got the $400 million it believed the women of riot deserved, they’d see as much as $135,306. That would likely be enough to make up for the wage gap and toxic environment these women had to endure.
Instead, they’re barely making back what Riot already may have owed them.
More than Money
Riot has agreed to monitoring and says they’ll have a diversity and inclusion group, but there are problems with this. First, will monitoring be enough? The sexism could still bubble under the surface. Women were denied promotions, had their ideas struck down in meetings, only to be picked up later when a man suggested them, and a pay gap grew at the company. Monitoring can look at a pay gap between employees of different levels, but will have to take in reports, things that will be more difficult to prove later, of mistreatment. Monitoring likely won’t be enough to change the culture of the company, especially since, as we saw from this lawsuit, any fine would just be a small drop in the water. $100 million isn’t enough to punish Riot, $400 million probably wasn’t even enough.
Riot’s starting up a diversity and inclusion initiative, which begs the question, why hadn’t they already? In fact, why haven’t they taken any drastic actions? The CEO, managers included in the lawsuit, the HR department, and anyone named as a harasser needs to be out the door yesterday, and publicly at that. A company culture comes from the top down, not from the bottom up. If you want to change a toxic culture, you need to hit the problem at its heart: the leadership. New rules and training will do nothing if it’s not enforced from the top down. CEOs are far from irreplaceable. It’s time to stop treating them like they’re special, or pretending as though a company’s success relies on them. For all of the jobs an AI could replace, CEO may be nearest to the chopping block. If a CEO incurred a $100 million payout, damaged a company’s brand, and hurt adoption of its games, then he’s not a good CEO. Creating a toxic environment is a failure of leadership, because leadership is more than a bottom line, it’s about pushing a team forward along a path, always looking to the future.
Diversity breeds innovation. It’s literally profitable to have a diverse group of people working on any project. Past success doesn’t guarantee future success, especially after damaging the brand and making hiring a nightmare. If Riot Games actually wants to change, they’d make changes. Instead, they’ve just paid out a sum representing a quarter of what the DFEH originally wanted.
Will they Learn?
Arcane, Riot’s TV show based on the lore of League of Legends. Photo: Riot
When Riot was first in the sights of California’s DFEH, I was, admittedly, a little gleeful about it. Anything that can improve the toxicity of the gaming industry and tech in general is welcome to me, a woman in tech. I got into software engineering through my love of games, and I hate that I would basically have to create my own studio if I wanted to work in gaming without working in a toxic workplace.
Riot also runs what is likely the most popular MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game, League of Legends. However, it has a culture so toxic, I never picked it up, despite liking the genre and liking the richness of the game’s lore. I used to be half decent at Vainglory on the iPad, before losing interest. A part of me actually was bitter that they allowed toxic players to ruin a would-be great game. I hated Riot for that before their reputation of toxic hellhole became common knowledge. Now, Riot makes a show I really like, Arcane. I have something to lose now if Riot “goes under.”
And yet…
Riot, and all game/tech companies like it, need to learn a harsh lesson. We can’t keep propping them up because we like what they make. $100 million isn’t enough to really force the company to drastically change its culture. Otherwise we’d have heard of mass firings of leaders who created this toxic culture. If punitive damages have to be limited to retribution in the form of money, then the fine has to be large enough to force the company to reconsider their culture. Make staffing changes, fire offenders, crack down on hate speech, misogyny, and harassment. Instead, $100 million is a small fraction of what Riot Games makes from just one of their games. Unfortunately, I doubt that will lead them to change anything, even if I hope it does.
A diversity and inclusion group, as well as monitoring may have a stronger effect. Those three years of monitoring could help the company form habits and culture while Riot Games is under a watchful eye. Of course, if the penalties they face for furthering discrimination are slaps on the wrist, perhaps they won’t stick to those new habits for very long. Maybe they won’t feel like they have to at all. A $100 million fine every decade or so is nothing to a company like Riot Games.
At the end of the day, this is a step in the right direction for Riot and the industry as a whole. Riot has been pushing hard to increase their recruitment of more diverse candidates and repair their image. They may very well actually want to change, though afraid to take the big steps to facilitate that change. I just hope we can keep this momentum going, because retribution after the damage is done just isn’t enough.
Riot could set the tone for the future of the game industry, one way or the other. But going off of how little they’ve been willing to change over the last three years, how little the gaming industry has changed despite these lawsuits, it’s hard to think the industry will move significantly in the right direction. Here’s to hoping the tiny steps we’re taking now will turn into a full sprint over the next few years.
Sources:
- Brian Ashcraft, Kotaku
- Kellen Browning, The New York Times
- M. Moon, Engadget
- Adi Robertson, The Verge