Quantic Dream's David Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumière, the leaders of Quantic Dream, have successfully sued the French newspaper Le Monde for libel. The outlet had initially claimed that work environment within Quantic Dream was toxic and employees were suffering as a result of alleged toxicity. The reports said that the studio forced crunch on employees and harbored a schoolboy culture that included sexist and racist jokes at the expense of other employees.
Former employees of Quantic Dream did sue the studio after the publication of these reports. Some of these people were alleged targets of "degrading images." At one point, there was a collection of roughly 600 "controversial" photoshopped images of staff that dated back to 2013, some of which were made public by various outlets. In 2019, Quantic Dream was ordered to pay at least one employee €7,000 over a photoshopped image. More recently, a court overturned a ruling from July 2018 concerning another former employee of the studio.
Both media outlets were sued after they reported on the toxic workplace culture found within Quantic Dream. These articles went up back in 2018. Quantic Dream obviously denied all of these allegations, as well as denying allegations of financial malpractice. The studio released a public statement on Twitter where they called these allegations a "smear" attempt against them. They filed legal proceedings several months after this statement was made.
A report by Solidaires Informatique (via Eurogamer) says that Le Monde's legal case was weakened. The newspaper was apparently unable to prove certain parts of its initial reporting all because they refused to give up the anonymity of its sources.
Another newspaper, this one being the French outlet Mediapart, was also sued by Quantic Dream. Unlike Le Monde, Mediapart was totally cleared. There were also separate libel cases by Quantic Dream, as a company, against both Le Monde and Mediapart that failed.
Details of the case were initially reported on by GI.biz back in May of 2021. As part of the trial, Quantic Dream's lawyers argued that a journalist wrote their article detailing workplace conditions "as revenge for (co-CEO) Guillaume de Fondaumière refusing them access to the VIP section of a Quantic Dream party."
At the time, Quantic Dream explained it had sued the newspapers for "publishing articles that we felt were not printed in good faith, nor with reasonable research nor evidence, and which drew false conclusions which extensively damaged the reputation and morale of the studio".
Right now, Quantic Dream is allegedly working on a new Star Wars title.
