This week's news recap includes stories from July 16 to July 23, documenting the biggest stories we reported on at TheGamer this week. The most troubling story of the week began Wednesday, as California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed its lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for its shocking alleged workplace culture of abuse and discrimination. The story remains ongoing, but we have chronicled the lawsuit and responses thus far.
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California Is Suing Activision Blizzard Over An Alleged 'Frat Boy' Culture
On July 21, the state of California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit alleging that Activision Blizzard held a "pervasive frat boy workplace culture." Allegations from the legal filings include accounts of sexual harassment, female employees being denied equal opportunities, racism, and sexism. In the days following, Activision Blizzard's president J. Allen Brack, chief compliance officer Frances F. Townsend, and Activision Blizzard have responded to the allegations.
Trigger Warning: rape, suicide, sexual assault, racism
The DFEH details numerous accounts of alleged misconduct, including something called a "cube crawl" where male employees drink "copious amounts of alcohol as they crawl their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees." The document also details an instance of a female employee taking her own life while on a company trip with a male supervisor, who was found by police to have brought "a buttplug and lubricant" on the business trip. Prior to her death, the lawsuit states that she had private nude photos passed around at a holiday party. The filing also includes instances of women of color who were singled out from their peers, targeted for sex and race discrimination. Male employees were reported as making jokes about sexual assault, and often shifting their responsibilities onto female employees.
In response to the lawsuit, Blizzard executive management has made statements that seemingly contradict each other. The first response from the company came in a statement to The Verge, where Activision Blizzard accused the DFEH of falsifying information, calling it "irresponsible behavior from unaccountable State bureaucrats that are driving many of the State's best businesses out of California." In a message that followed from Blizzard president J. Allen Brack, he called the allegations "extremely troubling" and encouraged employees to speak to management, HR, or legal representatives about any concerns.
Chief compliance officer Frances F. Townsend's email that came after pivoted back to denying any problems at present-day Blizzard, claiming they presented a "distorted and untrue picture of our company, including factually inaccurate, old, and out of context stories – some from more than a decade ago."
Current and former and employees have now responded as well, sharing their accounts of shocking abuse allegations they have experienced at the company. So far, over 30 employees have shared their stories, with some going back as far as 2012. Fans have also expressed their outrage with the publishing giant, staging sit-ins, canceling subscriptions, and demanding an alleged abuser have his likeness removed from World of Warcraft.
Steam And PSN Are Both Down Thanks To Huge Internet Outage
In a bit of an internet fluke this past Thursday, a few gaming-related digital marketplaces went offline for a couple of hours thanks to a service outage. Steam, the PlayStation Network, The Epic Games Store, and others were mostly inoperable after ISP Akamai faced some troubles with its DNS server. The issue wasn’t limited solely to gaming, but also took down websites for Southwest Airlines and Delta.
The issue would eventually resolve itself without any actions from users, but it does speak to concerns that people have over our increasingly online-enabled lives. Steam might not be the most important website you access on a given day, but if a small outage can take down a massive network like Valve’s, what’s to stop it from affecting something even bigger? Thankfully, nobody lost any money or data during this downtime.
We Can See A Glimpse Of Steam Deck's Preorder Numbers Due To HTML Hole
In better news for Valve, the company launched its pre-orders for the newly announced Steam Deck portable PC last Friday just days after Nintendo began taking reservations for its upcoming Nintendo Switch OLED. A large number of people all attempting to access Valve’s marketplace took the store offline for most of the day, which is eerily similar to our last story, although this was caused by heavy traffic rather than a genuine outage.
According to a hole in Valve’s HMTL code, website SteamDB (which archives all of the changes that happen to Steam’s storefront) was able to give users an idea of just how many pre-orders had been made. As it turns out, the Steam Deck has already moved more than 100,000 reservations. The majority of those were for the more expensive 512 GB model, but there was a decent chunk made for the 256 GB variant. While far from definitive, it seems Valve is onto something big here.
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Square Enix Accidentally Sends Digital Copies Of NEO: The World Ends With You A Week Early
Despite being well into the digital age at this point, publishers are still finding ways to mess up the launches of upcoming titles. This week, Square Enix accidentally sent digital codes for NEO: The World Ends With You to customers that had pre-ordered the title from its online store. A full ten days before the game was set to release to the public, some lucky players have been experiencing this return trip to Shibuya on their Switches thanks to a mix-up on Square Enix's part.
There is speculation going around that Nintendo or Square Enix may deactivate the codes it sent out, but that doesn’t seem likely. Considering the snafu was by Square Enix, it would be a logistical nightmare to cancel a large number of codes only to end up re-requesting them from Nintendo a week later.
Skyrim Player Spots A Giant Riding A Dragon
Skyrim is 1,000 years old at this point, but people are still finding new glitches within its massive world many years after release. This latest discovery saw Skyrim’s infamous giants riding dragons thanks to being right next to a player. Redditor Cassiusthevast captured video of their character mounting a dragon to fly across the fields of Skyrim while a giant happened to be close by. Instead of clipping through the dragon, the giant winds up standing on its back as the player takes off.
One user on Reddit wrote, “Man…just imagine being launched on the ground by one and that guy swoops in and launches you to the next galaxy. Todd Howard had ideas for Starfield earlier than we thought.” If space dragons don’t show up in Starfield now, I’ll be immensely disappointed.
There's An Animated Video Showing How Minecraft Creepers Were Made, And It's Terrifying
Minecraft is one of the most popular games of all time, and the Creepers are one of its most iconic characters. Fans have speculated for years where the game’s terrifying Creepers have come from, and a new fan video has crafted an equally terrifying tale.
The video begins with a warlock brewing a potion that can restore life. When he walks outside to grab the final ingredient, his cat accidentally knocks in a bunch of chemicals. After returning to finish the concoction, the warlock tries out the potion on a dead pig and it graphically morphs into the Creeper we all know and hate. It’s certainly a creative origin, though maybe not official.
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