Riot Games, the video game studio behind the highly successful League of Legends franchise, has paid $100 million in a settlement with plaintiffs in a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit.
The lawsuit was brought against the company, which is now owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent, by over 2,000 current and former female employees and contractors who alleged sexual harassment and pay disparity at the video games studio.
This gamer playing League of Legends might be considered an athlete, according to an IOC statement that stated, “competitive eSports could be considered as a sporting activity” © AFP/File CHANDAN KHANNA)
The penalty against Riot Games increased more than tenfold after the intervention of California employment agencies.
Via the Wrap:
The gender discrimination lawsuit against Riot Games was originally filed in 2018 and on track for a $10 million settlement. But that ending to the case was derailed when two California employment agencies decided to step in and block the settlement in early 2020 on the belief the current and former female employees of Riot Games — which was being investigated by the state of California based on claims of discrimination, sexual harassment, issues of salary parity and retaliation against women — would be entitled to a settlement of more than $400 million.
Earlier this year, Riot Games launched an internal committee to investigate the behavior of its chief executive, Nicolo Laurent, following a lawsuit filed by his former executive assistant Sharon O’Donnell that included claims of sexual harassment and gender discrimination. The committee, which was founded by the Riot Games board of directors, found no evidence to support the claims against Laurent. The lawsuit is still pending in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Discrimination lawsuits have been a booming industry in the United States ever since the passage of civil rights reforms in the 1960s and 70s.
However, even those cases that are championed by the media are not always successful, such as the highly publicized failure of former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao’s gender discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2015.
In his recent book Age of Entitlement, former Weekly Standard editor and Caremont Institute senior fellow Christopher Caldwell argues that the civil rights regime of the 1960s ended up creating more discrimination than it replaced, by creating a legal incentive for America and its institutions to be hyper-aware of race, gender, and other basic differences.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.