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Former Valve employee seeks $3.1M in transgender discrimination suit

draetenth said:
Disgusting on Valve's part if true and they should compensate the victim.



This is an odd post. Social Issues/Progressiveness (or the capability of their services) has nothing do with why many claim Valve is the savior of gaming or why EA is viewed as a "bad guy".

I view EA as a bad guy because they keep buying developers/series I like and run them into the ground. Usually by changing what made the games popular in the first place (like SimCity or Dungeon Keeper Mobile) and then when no one buys the games (because long-time fans don't like the changes or something) they have the gall/audacity to complain that no one likes the series any more and that's it (I would fucking love a Dungeon Keeper 3 or a Dead Space 4 if they were more like Dungeon Keeper 1/2 instead of Mobile or Dead Space 1/2 instead of 3).

I view Valve as a savior of PC gaming because they essentially were at the time: they came onto the scene when developers were abandoning the pc, it was really hard to patch games, and it could be hard/expensive to buy games. Valve and Steam saved PC gaming (though it was tough for a bit): now we had a central place to buy games, games could be purchased cheaper, and it was so much better/easier to patch games.

EA was around at the time (with the predecessor to Origin), yet couldn't be arsed to put the effort to save PC gaming (another point toward being a "bad guy"). Even now, it's not like they are doing anything for PC gaming - Origin is still just focused on EA games.

However, that doesn't mean EA shouldn't be praised for being socially progressive and Valve should absolutely be blasted for things like this
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its all identity politics bullshit, EA themselves try to deflect criticism of them with their progressive policies. i think it was during that period where EA were nominated for worst company in america award and one of the higher ups said it was because a bunch of conservatives didn't like how progressive they were, handily letting them dodge the real issues.

like you said, EA being seen as a shitty games companies is to do with their shitty games and destroying so many franchises/developers.
 
Pretty strong allegations since there has been a lot of drama with there treatment of translation volunteers. I hope this isn't just swept under the carpet like Penny Arcade drama (I woke up and people wrote mean things, here is a donation and a sorry letter)
 
my uncle sent me this response from a valve rep:

very real valve rep said:
yeah, we keep getting worse every year. yeah, we've treated employees like shit. what are you gonna do about it? stop giving us money? abandon your account and its valuable digital library? we have a monopoly on the PC game space, and you put us here. with your memes, and gabe newell worship, and blind hatred of any service that dare stand in our way. you can't escape us. we are a monster of your own design, and you're too financially invested to leave us now. we are valve, and we fucking own you.

and half-life 3 is never coming out.
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I dunno seems a little harsh but he makes some good points
 
Shang said:
my uncle sent me this response from a valve rep:



I dunno seems a little harsh but he makes some good points
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Man, I'm incensed by this. I will absolutely definitely leave the platform entirely after the summer sale that comes after I clear my backlog.
 
Is Washington an at-will employment state?

CertifiedFP said:
Kinda weird how the "bad guys" of PC gaming, EA, are probably the most progressive publishers around, whilst our "glorious lord and savior" Gaben and Valve seem to have a lot of right-wing leaning to them.
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I've seen this happen at more than one private company. Publicly-traded companies can't get away with HR issues that private companies can. The CEO of those private companies tend to imprint their own personal ethics onto the company culture, which usually turns out to be not so great.
 
Aselith said:
Man, I'm incensed by this. I will absolutely definitely leave the platform entirely after the summer sale that comes after I clear my backlog.
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i actually literally switched to gog like maybe almost a year ago now

though there are still a few games in my steam library that i may have to go back to at some point... but for all intents and purposes, im out
 
Drewton said:
$3m for not using a preferred pronoun is ridiculous.
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If the allegations are true then it's not like it was ignorance. It was pure bullying. And this guy has been doing shit like this before apparently. There's no place for that anywhere.

eyeball_kid said:
I've seen this happen at more than one private company. Publicly-traded companies can't get away with HR issues that private companies can. The CEO of those private companies tend to imprint their own personal ethics onto the company culture, which usually turns out to be not so great.
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I hope we're not implying that Gabe Newell is transphobic.
 
Tagyhag said:
I hope we're not implying that Gabe Newell is transphobic.
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gabe newell personally endorsed gamergate and, so much for his flat organisational structure, he made all his employees make posts under the #notyourshield twitter hashtag.

he is also a nazi
 
If true (which considering the previous history of cases where Valve fucks over employees, it might be very well true), then this is very, very disappointing.

I'd say Valve fell the fuck off, but that would be supposing they were in a good position in HR and hierarchies, which doesn't appear to be the case. It's interesting, almost unbelievable to say that Valve would get to this point, many fans being apathetic in their recent developments, them mistreating employees by inaction and apathy, etc.

Very sad. I hope that, if true, she gets compensation and at least shakes up the industry, not just the company, because this is unacceptable, specially in 2016.
 
domlolz said:
gabe newell personally endorsed gamergate and, so much for his flat organisational structure, he made all his employees make posts under the #notyourshield twitter hashtag.

he is also a nazi
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Do you have any evidence of this? I haven't seen much that confirms this.
 
Juan29.zapata said:
If true (which considering the previous history of cases where Valve fucks over employees, it might be very well true), then this is very, very disappointing.

I'd say Valve fell the fuck off, but that would be supposing they were in a good position in HR and hierarchies, which doesn't appear to be the case. It's interesting, almost unbelievable to say that Valve would get to this point, many fans being apathetic in their recent developments, them mistreating employees by inaction and apathy, etc.

Very sad. I hope that, if true, she gets compensation and at least shakes up the industry, not just the company, because this is unacceptable, specially in 2016.
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Even if Valve didn't fire her based on bigotry she still felt that was the case based on the work environment that was well established. So, basically causation is a moot point. The water was muddy the moment they let intolerance in the door and they are going to pay one way or the other.

It is one thing to understand that the actions rendered against her employment may not have been hate filled but it's another to turn a blind eye to the fact they failed her at some level.

And that level is easy to comprehend and can push past at-will laws to help her seek justice and invoke reform at Valve.
 
domlolz said:
the american constitution has some real gate-y rhetoric
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Nah, most GamerGaters are not as blatantly racist as the American Constitution.
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
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I don't see the problem in asking for volunteers if they want to do something sincerely... in fact Valve if you read this and need Italian translations for just a name in the credits be sure to contact me... i'm here, i'm dead serious.

The supervisor calling the ex-employee "it" is hella bad though.

Edit: nevermind, i just read that those were not volunteering but employee... yikes.
 
Vinland said:
Even if Valve didn't fire her based on bigotry she still felt that was the case based on the work environment that was well established. So, basically causation is a moot point. The water was muddy the moment they let intolerance in the door and they are going to pay one way or the other.

It is one thing to understand that the actions rendered against her employment may not have been hate filled but it's another to turn a blind eye to the fact they failed her at some level.

And that level is easy to comprehend and can push past at-will laws to help her seek justice and invoke reform at Valve.
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Absolutely. What surprises me is that they did nothing when an employee was being clearly transphobic. It's baffling and infuriating.
 
Some serious accusations being thrown at Valve dayum. Hope they're unfounded but guess we'll have to wait and see what evidence comes out.
 
Juan29.zapata said:
Absolutely. What surprises me is that they did nothing when an employee was being clearly transphobic. It's baffling and infuriating.
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Yep. And that is why people are keen to start the witch hunt against Valve culure. They (Valve) have handed the wrong people a map to make it easy to find the warts.
 
Weird. In my experience it's contractors that get paid the overtime, and permanent staff that don't.
 
StrangeTaco said:
Some serious accusations being thrown at Valve dayum. Hope they're unfounded but guess we'll have to wait and see what evidence comes out.
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It wouldn't surprise me at all if this gets settled out of court and locked behind a wall of NDAs. Waiting for future information to arise out of this solely depends on how the the plaintiff wants to handle it and who their legal team is. No chance Valve walks out of this case the same Valve.
 
It's good I am not heavily invested in Steam or Valve. Now I will make sure that they won't be getting any of money from now on. Such a vile behavior from a company that was considered one of the best in the gaming industry. It's sad how far they have fallen over the years.
 
GameAddict411 said:
It's good I am not heavily invested in Steam or Valve. Now I will make sure that they won't be getting any of money from now on. Such a vile behavior from a company that was considered one of the best in the gaming industry. It's sad how far they have fallen over the years.
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One HR bureaucratic employee is not representative of the whole company.
 
shangolin said:
Do you have some statistics that show the lean of the tech industry?
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Well, to start, neither NeoGAF or Anita Sarkeesian is in any way representative of Silicon Valley/tech industry trends.

For a decent starting point, this covers one of the bigger points. The whole thing is complicated by some weird factors -- tech employees are much more liberal than tech executives, and tech libertarians have pretty different points of focus than traditional conservatives -- but the specific mode of anti-labor, laissez-faire, tax-avoidant right-libertarian is definitely seen frequently amongst tech execs and VCs.

Unison said:
Not trying to upset anyone... just trying to understand.
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These aren't unreasonable questions, but you should really read through the documents once.

JoeyJungle said:
I don't know anything about their unpaid translation stuff, but I'm really surprised about the allegations of trans discrimination. I thought Gaben himself pulled that one Dota commentator from that competition in China because he made sexist/transphobic comments on the first day of his stream? I know from reading comments from ex-employees that their structure isn't as hunkey-dorey as they claim, but I'm really surprised to see allegations of transphobia present and vocally expressed in the company.
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The whole problem is just the lack of HR oversight. The company as a whole seems pretty clearly to not be transphobic in policy or culture, but with effectively no HR apparatus and no behavioral oversight an individual bigot can do a lot of damage before something is done to address the situation.

Vinland said:
While it does smell like the supervisor had it out for her because of bigotry there is nothing here that suggests the company was complicit with the bigotry.
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It's the allegation that she brought this up to HR and it wasn't acted on that makes it a corporate issue.

Vinland said:
It wouldn't surprise me at all if this gets settled out of court and locked behind a wall of NDAs.
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It is extraordinarily unlikely that this goes to trial or that the parties are allowed to talk about it afterwards, yes.

Sijil said:
One HR bureaucratic employee is not representative of the whole company.
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Uh, literally 100% of an HR employee's entire job is to be, officially and legally speaking, a representative of the whole company.
 
jmxxii said:
Great HL3 will never be made now..
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Vortigaunt.png

I heard Vortigaunts are on it for quite some time. And by 'it' I mean Gaben.
 
Majukun said:
then we discover that the culprit was not a native english speaker but german,which now actually has a third gender ,and was just trying to translate that in english,just like I usually assign things a gender when speaking english because i'm italian and we consider things to be either male or female

anyway,we can only hope for a quick and just resolution,but i always wondered if there's a table anywhere that quantifies moral damage in monetary penalties and how it somehow always reaches several millions bucks
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using DAS for a Person of any gender is an unmistakable offense. It's about as dehumanising as you can get and no German native speaker would use this Form for a Person and not intend to be hurtfull.
 
Love Valve, but the sheen on the work culture wore off long ago. The impression I've got is that the cabal system has gradually given away to a darwinian-capitalist death pit. Simple tribalism grew where no structure had been planted.
 
Valve really isnt the same company, not in a good way either

Still love steam and their games to death, but this isnt cool
 
Vire said:
Noooo what the hell...

I thought Valve was one of the better ones. This sucks.
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You're in for a real wake up call if you think corporations operate under the pretense of "good".

My take is that if the allegations are true, the employee probably had more seniority and a better track record than the woman he harrased.

Good to great performers are shielded all the time in companies. HR is not some independent body. They exist for the company's interest.
 
Vire said:
Noooo what the hell...

I thought Valve was one of the better ones. This sucks.
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To be fair it was 2012 and Valve was just transitioning into Steam Big Picture and Greenlight.
It could have been the Steam department. Says nothing what division she worked in.
 
TheSlySoul said:
To be fair it was 2012 and Valve was just transitioning into Steam Big Picture and Greenlight.
It could have been the Steam department. Says nothing what division she worked in.
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Not saying there allegations aren't true, but why would you wait four years to file a suit like this?
 
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