The Rot of Riot Games Culture Starts at the Top

CEO Nicolo Laurent continues to employ multiple top executives who have been accused of sexism and harassment—and is himself the subject of a complaint.
nicolo laurent
Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent faces his own allegations of impropriety. Photograph: Jack Thomas

In 2014, Riot Games' then-executive assistant Melanie McCracken began to notice that her supervisor, Jin Oh, didn’t seem to hire women into senior leadership vacancies. Women were generally brought on as assistants, she said in a 2018 civil complaint alleging widespread gender discrimination at the League of Legends publisher. Oh, an executive at the company, “claimed that he would ‘feel weird having a male’ in such a role,” according to the complaint. It was part of a pattern, she alleges, of Oh disadvantaging women based on their sex or gender.

McCracken began looking for a new job at Riot in September 2014—ideally one with more upward mobility. As she tried to escape, McCracken began to feel that Oh was creating a hostile work environment. According to the complaint, she went to human resources to report the alleged retaliation and discrimination. Shortly after, McCracken found herself in a meeting with Oh to discuss the HR discussion, which she had believed was confidential.

McCracken transitioned from Riot’s international region to the North America region in March 2015. Oh eventually landed there as well, as the new temporary head. After his arrival, McCracken in 2016 was “given a five-month countdown to find a new position or ‘be fired,’” reads the complaint. She found one, in the Internal Communications division, and Oh left Riot later that year. (The HR rep McCracken spoke with left the company in 2019.)

But in 2018, Riot chief executive officer Nicolo Laurent rehired Oh. The HR rep rejoined the company, too, and now directs human resources for Oh’s department. Oh now has a very long title: Riot’s president of esports, marketing, publishing operations, and international offices. None of his direct reports, except his executive assistant, are women. A Riot Games spokesperson said in a statement that “many senior-level women” work in the publishing organization that Oh leads.

Over the past two years, several women, most recently Riot CEO Nicolo Laurent’s former executive assistant Sharon O'Donnell, have stepped forward with allegations of gender-based discrimination and harassment at the company. Many of those court filings—including one previously unreported complaint by a former Riot employee from December—underscore that under Laurent’s watch, several executives remain employed at Riot despite multiple repeated allegations of impropriety.

McCracken is one of eight women named in a potential class action suit brought against Riot Games alleging widespread gender discrimination. (McCracken took a settlement and is no longer part of that suit. Others, except one, have been moved to arbitration because of clauses signed upon employment.) The suit follows a 2018 Kotaku report in which dozens of current and former employees described a work environment where women faced added scrutiny in the hiring process, received fewer advancement opportunities than men, were routinely talked over at meetings, and were under-compensated compared to men in similar positions with similar qualifications.

The “boys’ club” ethos at Riot extended beyond employment practices. Sources interviewed by Kotaku said they received unsolicited pictures of male genitalia or were on emails or lists describing colleagues’ sexual interest in them. Scott Gelb, chief operating officer of Riot Games—who remains at the company after a brief suspension and sensitivity training—would grab male employees’ genitals, apparently as a joke, and fart in people’s faces, sources said. California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing and the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement are also investigating alleged widespread gender discrimination at Riot Games.

Riot has made an effort to cleanse its ranks of problem employees, offer sensitivity training, and institute more structured hiring practices. Riot contracted Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, whom Uber brought on to fix its allegedly sexist culture, and created a chief diversity officer position within the company. While bottom- and mid-level employees are feeling the effects of cultural change, two sources tell WIRED that Riot’s top leadership has closed ranks around some of the company’s most problematic employees, who remain at the helm of the 2,500-person game company. Laurent, they say, has endeavored to retain and protect these employees.

Laurent has not responded publicly to O’Donnell’s allegations, but Riot says it has retained the law firm Seyfarth Shaw to investigate them; a special committee of the company’s board of directors will review the findings. (Seyfarth Shaw actively promotes its class-action expertise; Riot had previously retained the firm to investigate the complaints that came to light in 2018.) Riot said in a statement to WIRED that it has put “thousands of hours of interviews and related diligence” into investigating employees. “Every single person at Riot is accountable to our policies, regardless of seniority,” the company says, adding that it has taken “numerous disciplinary actions against senior leaders, including terminating multiple leaders based on their past conduct.” Riot has improved racial and gender diversity across the company, it says, noting that 40 percent of its senior executive team members are women. Riot declined to comment on Laurent’s alleged complicity in Riot’s culture of sexism and his role in retaining high-level problem employees.

Laurent has worked at Riot Games for 11 years, beginning as the vice president of Riot’s international division. In 2017 he rose to CEO. Sources describe him as intelligent and stubborn. O’Donnell’s complaint alleges that Laurent told her to be “more feminine,” that she was “beautiful” but also had an “abusive tone,” and that he once asked her to “cum” over to his house while his wife was absent. In the complaint, O’Donnell also alleges that Laurent stared at her “in a sexual fashion when discussing his underwear, telling Plaintiff that he really was a size extra-large but that he just liked a ‘tight fit.’” O’Donnell’s complaint also says that Laurent suggested to a female employee during an all-hands meeting that she could deal with Covid-related stress by having kids.

O’Donnell alleges in the complaint that, after she refused to “cum” to his house, Laurent’s “hostility and anger” increased. Riot fired O’Donnell in 2020 and has cited “multiple well-documented complaints from a variety of people” as the reason. In a statement to WIRED, O’Donnell’s lawyer, Michael Baltaxe, denies that O’Donnell was fired because of complaints. “She alleges that she was wrongfully terminated because she refused to give in to Nicolo Laurent’s sexual overtures,” Baltaxe says. “She also alleges that she was also wrongfully terminated because she was a strong woman in a male-dominated, sexist company where women are devalued. She looks forward to proving her case.”

Since the 2018 Kotaku report, Laurent has made several statements expressing contrition for Riot’s culture of sexism. In July 2020, in a blog published by GamesIndustry.Biz, Laurent described how Riot leadership spent innumerable hours hearing out employees in the wake of public scrutiny. “It was during one of these sessions, sitting next to a Rioter who broke into tears after sharing their story, that my most powerful realization occurred,” he wrote. “I had understood their struggle on an intellectual level, but I had lacked the insight required to truly understand their painful, emotional perspective.” (Two sources say Laurent once expressed in an all-hands that he can relate to discrimination against women in games because he is French and working in the US, implying that he, too, is a minority.) Laurent says in the blog that Riot’s cultural issues, in part, came from “focusing and solving isolated events but never stepping back to consider the whole landscape.”

The buck stops with the CEO, he added.

In the post, Laurent defends his decision to retain Gelb. Three sources speaking with Kotaku in 2018 said they saw Gelb touch men’s genitals, apparently as a joke. Five said they saw him farting near or on male employees. Others said he would hump colleagues, also in jest, or tell inappropriate jokes. Laurent implies in the blog that these allegations, corroborated by several sources, were overblown. A two-month leave of absence, he says, was “the appropriate response.” According to McCracken’s complaint, in 2018 she worked approximate to Laurent and Gelb in her role in Riot’s communications division. At one point, the complaint says, she received a text from a colleague containing a video of Gelb at a “dance club with scantily clad women in Shanghai.” She allegedly made an innocuous joke about executives’ antics to other colleagues, which led to Gelb discovering she knew what allegedly happened. He called a meeting with her. At that time, the complaint alleges, Gelb “posited that maybe he had ‘done something to her at a party’ or previously harassed her to warrant the dissemination of such photographs.’” (The complaint does not mention her disseminating any photographs; Gelb has not addressed the allegations publicly.)

Later on, Laurent allegedly approached McCracken in the presence of colleagues and joked, “I hear that you have naked photos of Gelb on the dark web. How much are they?”

Laurent continues to employ Gelb. In January 2020, WIRED discovered that a third-party marketing firm contracted by Riot had attempted to boost Gelb's and Oh’s Google search results to include more positive narratives of their employment at Riot. Riot discontinued its work with the firm after WIRED asked for comment at that time, and a company spokesperson said Riot did not know about these efforts and that those tactics “go well beyond anything we requested or approved, and run directly counter to our values as an organization.”

Gelb and Oh aren’t the only executives Laurent has protected. Riot’s head of franchise development, Thomas Vu, is referenced in several suits against Riot Games, including one previously unreported complaint filed in December by Yoko Colby, a former contract employee. Colby, who worked under Vu, alleges in the complaint that the executive “would favor males over females.” She believes that her move to full-time employment was “stalled due to discrimination and retaliation for her speaking out against discrimination and harassment,” reads the complaint. She believes Vu routinely undermined her projects and attempts to get brought on full time despite positive feedback on her work from other colleagues. The complaint states that an HR rep said Vu’s behavior was not acceptable, but Colby was nonetheless constructively terminated in May 2019.

Gabriela Downie, another contractor who worked under Vu when he was the head of creative, alleges in a separate complaint that Vu “assembled a loyal following of male employees who have made Riot Games their own personal fraternity house.” Vu’s assistant in 2013 and 2014, Chanel Dawnee, alleged in a 2019 complaint that she was “exposed to consistent sexism and harassment.” It says Vu once compared Dawnee to a “brothel girl” and several times touched her back and shoulders. Dawnee says she believes she was not promoted for a long time because Vu “wanted an attractive female assistant,” the complaint says, and because he seemed to consider her underqualified for other roles. (She was previously a creative producer at another company.) Although Dawnee eventually became a narrative editor, she believes her goal to become a creative producer was, the complaint notes, “extinguished because Mr. Vu continues to remain at the helm of the company's creative endeavors and maintains a demonstrable bias against women.”

Riot declined to comment on whether Vu or Oh have been investigated or disciplined based on alleged behavior toward female subordinates.

Several plaintiffs in these lawsuits have been compelled into arbitration. For many years, all employees at Riot Games were asked to sign forced arbitration agreements along with their other hiring papers. Instead of taking allegations of gender discrimination before a judge and jury, Riot employees who signed the agreement must work with a private arbitrer, hired by Riot, in a private, extralegal forum.

When several contemporary and former employees attempted to sue Riot in 2019 for allegedly violating California’s Equal Pay Act, Riot filed a motion to force some of those employees into arbitration. The move spurred a 150-person walkout. Picketing employees demanded Riot drop its forced arbitration clause in a move echoing 20,000 Google employees’ walkout to end forced arbitration. Late January, a court ruled that all of the women named in the potential class action suit against Riot Games except Gabriela Downie must arbitrate their issues out of court because of the arbitration clauses they signed. The class action suit will continue under Downie’s name.

In a statement, Colby told WIRED that she is frustrated with being forced into arbitration. “They have tried to convince us that arbitration is a win-win,” she says. “They say it's private, it's faster, it's cheaper. But in reality it's never a win for inconsequential people like me. As a citizen against a corporation, my only strength would have been an impartial jury with zero conflict of interest.”

Companies with 2,500 employees don’t accidentally develop cultures of sexism. Complicity from the top creates a climate of impunity. Responsibility is a slippery thing, but all it takes to identify the root of permissiveness at Riot Games is looking at an org chart.


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