The scandal that blew up in 2018 claimed that the French team has a toxic working environment, and now that the court case over the situation is over, Quantic Dream declared victory.

In 2018, three French press outlets, namely Canard PC, Le Monde, and Mediapart published articles about Quantic Dream’s (Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Detroit: Become Human)  working environment. According to Canard PC, employees faced a long crunch pattern on each game, and one of the managers have made six hundred Photoshopped images „of dubious taste,” featuring the studio’s employees’ faces edited onto the bodies of other people, such as porn stars or Nazi characters. It led to the entire IT department quitting, followed by a court case.

On April 7, the Paris Court of Appeals issued a decision in Quantic Dream’s favour, which led to the French company publishing a statement, and they say this is the final proof of „the absence of a ‘toxic atmosphere’ or any kind of discrimination in the studio,” as this victory was backed up by several staff representatives’ statements. The company added that they have had „numerous inspections by government services in recent years,” and they failed to find „irregularities in the management of the company and/or its contracts.”

They added that the employees and ex-employees who denied the accusations „were violently attacked by people acting under false identities,” all part of an organized campaign. „More than 10,000 tweets were sent in a few days by a single account on Twitter, to get the allegations against the company to the top of the search engines. There is evidence that a very small number of people are behind these actions, which are aimed at deliberately tarnishing the studio’s image and damaging its team,” Quantic Dream claims.

After David Cage, a founder and head of Quantic Dream was interviewed by IGN, as they opened a new branch in Montreal (this city is easily becoming one of the centres of game development!), a French union, Solidaires Informatique responded with a press release. Cage claimed that „all allegations about our studio have been indisputably proven wrong,” and Solidaires Informatique disputed this comment, describing it as part of an effort by Quantic Dream „to get its public image under control,” using a pattern of „silencing all dissident voices.”

We suspect that this story is not over yet.

Source: PCGamer