"As there has been no improvement, we have been forced to take legal action."
Sega has announced that it has successfully sued an unnamed person responsible for (the following is machine translated) "excessive slanderous and insulting comments on social media against one of our employees."
In a Japanese press release shared yesterday the company said that, though it welcomes fans' "encouragement" and "sometimes even harsh comments about our products and services," the harassment from the individual in question crossed a line. It had also been sustained for "a long time," preventing the targeted employee from getting on with their work "with peace of mind."
"As there has been no improvement," continued Sega, "we have been forced to take legal action." The company managed to obtain the harasser's identity with the consent of the courts and promptly initiated legal proceedings, much to the detriment of the harasser in question.
"We have reached a settlement in which the subject will pay damages to our employee, delete the slanderous and insulting comments, and refrain from such actions in future," says Sega. What's more, the corporation threw down the gauntlet against anyone else who might think about targeting its employees in a similar way in future, saying they consider slander, intimidation, and harassment "to be serious human rights issues that damage the dignity of employees and lead to a deterioration of the work environment.
"In order to respect all employees and protect their human rights, we will continue to take appropriate action based on our Customer Harassment Policy when we judge any behaviour to be malicious." In other words: Anyone who tries to pull the same stunt will find themselves answering to Sega's lawyers in court, too.
PCG reached out to Sega for comment on this story, but it declined to offer one and pointed us back to the press release.
Harassment of devs is a gargantuan but relatively little-discussed problem across the entire games industry, with a disturbing 91% of respondents to last year's Game Developer Conference survey answering that abuse from players is an ongoing issue.
Although there have been other big wins by studios against harassers like this one, it's kind of a drop in the ocean. Bungie managed to win $500,000 from a "racist shitstain" who harassed and threatened a Destiny 2 community manager last year, but it had no perceptible effect on Destiny developers being harassed. Though it's never a bad thing when people who use the veil of anonymity to behave like monsters get their just desserts, I suspect the same will, unfortunately, be true for Sega.
