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Comment by JonathanMerklin | Hacker News Reader

On topic: Does anyone know if there is some precedent for lawsuits like this? From years of experience in the art of existing as a human, I would guess A-B can't possibly be the only organization with these problems, but if a lawsuit like this has happened before, it must have been targeting a much lower profile company that flew under my cultural radar.

Mostly off topic: I wouldn't consider myself a gamer (anymore), and I get that it's about high revenue examples, but I thought "Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush" was quite the structural anapest to begin the article.

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> Does anyone know if there is some precedent for lawsuits like this?

Yes, lawsuits (both private and public) over sexual harassment and pay discrimination have a lot of history.

> From years of experience in the art of existing as a human, I would guess A-B can't possibly be the only organization with these problems, but if a lawsuit like this has happened before, it must have been targeting a much lower profile company that flew under my cultural radar.

DFEH is, since last year, involved in (by intervening in an existing class action) a similar suit against Riot Games that blew up after DFEH objected to a proposed $10M settlement saying it should be more like $400M. That case has slid off into a mess I can't quite trace easily; it looks like the DFEH and DLSE public claims, plus one private plaintiff who never signed an arbitration agreement are proceeding in court and other private plaintiffs were forced into arbitration but may also benefit from the public claims in court.

I was referring more to "the state of California" being the plaintiff, for which giantg2 gave me the minutiae I was interested in. I hope it's obvious that I didn't think this was the first sexual harassment/pay discrimination case in recorded history. Thanks for pointing out DFEH's existence and involvement with the Riot Games hubbub; that was useful information that served as a good jumping off point for my skim research.

They are being sued u der California law. I think that specific law is fairly new and I can't recall any big cases in the news about it, but there may be stuff that wasnt reported. The other possibility is that places settle out of court in private negotiations. Either way, my impression is that there isn't much out there.

While it's not a precedent in the legal sense of the term, there's been a case in France against Ubisoft that has striking similarities [1]:

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/ubisoft-ceo-a...

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