EA Asks Employees To Report Abuse and Harassment

As you’ve no doubt picked up by now, the video game industry has currently been rocked by a number of sexual abuse scandals, with everyone from indie devs to big triple-A developers being caught in the crossfire. One company that’s managed to keep out of the mire so far is EA – but frankly, it would be naive to assume that there’s not something happening at EA behind closed doors. In a secretive, insular industry like this one, people may very well fear speaking out about sexual abuse for the very same reason they would fear speaking up against unfair labor practices: it would ruin their career prospects and change very little.

Perhaps in an earnest effort to root out its own terrible employees – or a more cynical effort to preempt what it considers inevitable – EA is now urging its employees to come forward with their own stories and accusations, either openly or privately.

In recent days we’ve seen and heard a number of disturbing stories around sexual harassment, abuse and misconduct in our industry. We want to be very clear on our position: these behaviors are never ok -- not in our communities or any others. Electronic Arts supports everyone that has come forward to report abuse and we are asking anyone who has experienced any kind of harassment or sexual misconduct in our community to come forward.

We take every allegation seriously and we investigate it. We are deeply committed to ensuring there is safe space for people to come forward and taking the right actions on behalf of our community. The stories we’ve heard recently make it clear there is still a lot of work to be done in our industry.

Now, being the cynic that I am, I can’t help but point out there’s no reason for them to post this publicly – they could have sent it internally for the exact same effect. So they’re kind of using this recent outburst as an opportunity to make a PR move, which is cruddy. They also seem to be indirectly urging people to keep it internal rather than taking it to the public, which doesn't strictly have to be bad... if we could trust EA to actually fire the accused, rather than just shuffle people around or to bury the story.

I don't trust EA that much. But hopefully we'll get news in the coming week that proves me wrong.