Riot Games walkout took over 150 employees against sexist culture

The talks about disgruntled Riot Games' employees doing a walkout materialized into an event that took place yesterday, May 6, 2019. This drastic measure happened because several employees of the League of Legends developer wanted to show their position against a culture of sexism and the recent stance on forced arbitration. Kotaku has an interesting report on this walkout.

Over 150 Riot employees made their voices heard, despite the understandable fear that Riot management might retaliate: “I was worried. I was like, ‘What if I go and nobody shows up?’ I’m a little less worried about that now.” A Riot representative told Kotaku that “we respect Rioters who choose to walkout today and will not tolerate retaliation of any kind as a result of participating (or not).” Let's hope that stays like that for any future walkouts and other actions which are already planned, as the employees claim that they haven't seen any changes in the studio's culture after the shocking report from last year.

However, retaliation is a concern, as Riot writer Indu Reddy said: “We will prepare for retaliation. I think it wouldn’t be smart to not plan for it. But we’re not assuming it either because leadership said they wouldn’t retaliate—for this one, anyway. We will continue to ask for confirmation for future demonstrations.”

It's troublesome when the industry comes to this, but we're led to believe that this Riot Games situation is just a drop in the ocean and more scandals will surface. One of the latest is Epic Games' aggressive take on “voluntary” crunch for Fortnite Battle Royale content. Luckily, we also get the good kind of news such as Grinding Gear Games' “no crunch” stance for Path of Exile or Respawn's quality of life concerns when it comes to Apex Legends content.