The French dev team, Quantic Dream that has gone independent to be a publisher continues to struggle with the journalists and vice versa.

In 2018, David Cage‘s team was accused to have a toxic working environment – the accusations included sexual harassment and other inappropriate conduct towards the employees. Quantic Dream continues to deny these claims, even though the team has been scrutinised several times by the court (and Quantic Dream has been found guilty of not fulfilling security obligations towards its employees), but in an interview with VentureBeat, Cage says the journalists from Le Monde, CanardPC, and Mediapart (who have investigated them) have a personal agenda and bias towards them.

The founder and head of the studio claims they got questions such as „We found an invoice of $10 for room service in a hotel in Las Vegas. Was this for a prostitute?”, „We heard that one of your employees had a mouse pad with a sexy female character. Do you think this is acceptable?”, „One of your employees had a heavy metal T-shirt that someone found offending. Do you encourage this?”, „You are known to work a lot. Are you aware that some people who work less may feel bad about you working more?”. Cage thinks that the journalist insisted on painting Quantic Dream negatively instead of doing a thorough investigation regarding the ex-employees’ claims.

The accused journalists responded by saying that these questions were made up by Quantic Dream’s PR team for the VentureBeat interview. Sebastien Delahaye has published the questions that the Le Monde/CanardPC/Mediapart trio have asked from Quantic Dream on December 26, 2017. The file is in French (makes sense, both parties are from that country…), but we’ll quickly look over these questions.

The first batch of questions about the Photoshopped employees (and one person’s monogram, BG, has been mentioned, too), the second one is about layoffs and departures, the third one is focusing on labour law, the fourth one is aimed at the racist and sexist comments, and the fifth one is regarding the demotion of Guillaume de Fondaumière from the executive producer position (plus there’s a question about a tax audit). Delahaye says the questions are long and boring… and we give him that. None of the questions come even close to the ones Cage quoted.

Since VentureBeat published the interview, several journalists criticised the site, and they called Dean Takahashi, the interviewer, nothing more than a mouthpiece for Quantic Dream, as he made several PR interviews instead of doing independent investigation. VentureBeat hasn’t responded yet.

This has been going on for two years now. When will it end?

Source: PSL

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