Activision Blizzard pays 18 million dollar settlement in sexual harassment suit

$18 million dollars that's million bucks.

Source

The skinny:

EEOC spokeswoman Nicole St Germain said the agency was pleased that Fischer said she would approve the settlement. She said that in addition to the payout, the deal requires Activision to take steps to prevent and address discrimination, harassment and retaliation.

In a 2021 complaint, the EEOC had accused Activision of failing to take corrective and preventive measures on sexual harassment complaints, discriminating against women in pay and promotions, and discriminating against pregnant workers. Activision denied violating anti-bias laws, but has said it will make changes to how it addresses workplace complaints.

Worth noting this is only one of several ongoing lawsuits revolving around sexual harassment cases at Activision Blizzard.

It's unfortunate that it took a lawsuit to get us here, but I imagine/hope developers will pay much more attention to how this shit is handled moving forward, out of financial paranoia if nothing else.

Damn... What's that? Like, a tenth of the cost of making a COD game? That'll teach 'em.

@brian_: Companies like this work to maximize their gains. If it costs much less that 1/10 of a CoD budget to implement changes in their policy, then they probably will. Keep in mind that this is not the only suit on the table.

I am definitely not saying that all is fine or dandy or that whatever changes they implement will be very effective (a lot of harassment is down to workplace culture more than anything else, which seems pretty rotten in Activision's case) just that money that might seem like small change to large companies is still loss that they would rather be without.

That's not enough.

@nuttism: For any truly meaningful change to happen their, you need more than policy. You need leadership that cares about the policy. Leadership that shouldn't need policy to do the right thing in the first place. When management is leading the company to billions of dollars, they aren't going to risk changing any of it for a few million. That is maximizing gains.

Good for the victims, but it should be more. This amount of money equates to what? A week's worth of WoW subscriptions?

Here's your daily reminder that "justice" and the law doesn't exist / apply to corporations and the 1%.

$18 million... that's it?! That's a misc. line item on a budget for "cost of doing business," not unlike the repeat corporate offenders who simply pay the fines rather than change their policies, and continue doing business as usual.

Bobby & the Board spend more than that a month on Hookers & Cocaine.

And here comes Microsoft with their Golden Parachute payouts... What an absolute joke.

Most victims likely never would have seen that kind of money in their lifetime, so good for them. But for a major company like Blizzard, that 18 million is more like them playing 18 hundred in compensation. And they will easily make that money back.

Some layoffs should make up the difference nicely.

I dunno why they even pay PR, they've got an entire army of people on social media willing to stick up for them and silence dissent for free.

For a single victim $18 million would be a pretty good settlement. For the entire EEOC who I assume will split this money among the plaintiffs ehh not so much.

@humanity: According to Kotaku reporting, if they split it evenly amongst each claimant, everyone's looking at a cool $450. Sweet. Everyone go out and get new Xboxes! But get a S. You don't have enough for an X.

Barely a slap on the wrist.

And people wonder why an a doomer and a communist.

what a surprise.... Not unexpected but more disappointed.

$18,000,000 divided by $450 would mean 40,000 claimants, which is about 4 times as many employees as Activision has.

Not trying to say the payout is particularly great, just that the maths that came up with $450 per claimant may be suspect.

@arjailer: Not all of that $18 million is going to the claimants. Part of it is being used to pay for Activision/Blizzard to establish the harassment programs the company should have had in the first place. I'm assuming the $450 per person estimate comes from what's leftover once everybody else takes their cut of it.

@arjailer said:

Yeah, I don't know how Kotaku is reaching that number. It sounds like more than a little bit of clown math.

The whole point of the claims process in the settlement is that no one really knows the exact number of claimants yet. If you read the decree, it contains a release of claims agreement where the dollar value is blank so it can be filled in later.

@brian_: If you take half of Activision's employees as claimants (which is probably way too high) then 5,000 x $450 is $2.25 million (which sounds pretty pitiful)

But those should be some damn good harassment programs they're putting in place for the remaining $15.75 million.

Kotaku references a letter from the Communications Workers of America union that's working with the claimants for that $450 number, but looking at the actual letter, the only place I see that $450 number come up is in what was budgeted for each claimant's legal fees to hire someone to look over the settlement. So someone probably misread something.