To those in the gaming community, Riot Games is known for one of the most popular PC and macOS games currently in the professional esport community – the League of Legend (LoL). With over 100 million users each month, the League of Legend is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game that is played worldwide with over $29 million in prize money available from professional tournaments, not including collegiate scholarship prizes.
However, this year, Riot Games has some serious soul searching to do within its own workplace when many of its current and former employees accused the game developer of having a sexist “bro” culture that is similar to a college fraternity. The Riot Game culture is undergoing a tumultuous 2019 after a complicated 2018 that was marked by accusations and lawsuits concerning gender discrimination and sexual harassment.
To their credit, Riot Games has made several attempts to alleviate their problems. They have recently issued a new set of company values on their website that replaces the previous company manifesto from 2012. This new company wide manifesto was the result after surveying the situation and talking to more than 1,700 employees about employee expectations and vision on what the company should be. Employees have had the chance to reflect on these new values a full month before the company shared these new values with the rest of the world.
The updates to the new values came about after several legal troubles in 2018 when a current and a former employee sued the company for unpaid wages, gender pay discrimination, and sexual harassment. These lawsuits brought Riot Games front and center under worldwide scrutiny from the gaming community, gaming industry, and civil rights agencies. The two original plaintiffs, Melanie McCracken and Jes Negron, accused Riot Games of creating a workplace culture that is professionally inappropriate. They compared the Riot Games culture to that of a college fraternity.
In the lawsuit, they cited being passed over for promotions by new hires, having ideas rejected that were later approved when it came from a male colleague, and inappropriate workplace conversation topics. They also pointed out that those who previously committed sexual harassment acts were allowed to stay with the company with the same pay and position.
In addition to the above, McCracken and Negron also claimed that Riot Games violated the California Fair Pay Act that protects Californians from unequal wages for performing the same tasks. In her lawsuit, Negron claimed that after her former manager left the company, she assumed all of his responsibilities. However, she was refused a promotion to an equivalent job title after a year and instead earned a third of her former manager's salary. Her former manager was claimed to have earned $160,000, while Negron continued earning $59,000 after assuming new responsibilities.
After the original lawsuit was filed, three other employees have also filed lawsuits. Due to arbitration clauses in employee contracts, two of the lawsuits may be settled through third-party arbitration. This again sparked anger and discontent among civil rights agency and employees. Riot Games' refusal to remove the arbitration clause for sexually harassed employees resulted in more than 100 employee walkouts during the spring of 2019.
Riot Games has made several attempts to pacify its own employees in 2019. Its new set of company values was only the start. A new senior adviser was hired to develop the company's diversity inclusion initiative. The company has also promised to review its arbitration clause after this current round of litigation is over, as well as initiate a review of its recruitment process. Although many of its current and former employees are still unsatisfied with the changes, Riot Games aims to make diversity a priority in the next few years.
