Over the past few months, Bungie has been launching a series of lawsuits to protect its employees. Specifically, the company has been suing people with harassers and game cheaters being the main target of Bungie’s litigation efforts. In some instances, however, the employees of the company are apparently taking matters into their own hands, launching a lawsuit independent of the developer.
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The circumstances of this lawsuit started in early June when a Bungie employee tweeted an advertisement for Destiny 2 with two videos that feature a gamer known as Uhmaayze. The ads themselves call the individual, who was African American, a hero. Soon after a campaign of doxxing against the company began and the identities of the employees were revealed. Employees then began receiving death threats on their personal phones, images of their company badges were posted on the internet, racial slurs were thrown at them, and, in one case, someone actually had a pizza delivered to an employee’s house. All of these events severely distressed the company’s employees.
Lately, Bungie, and earlier this summer two of the company’s employees, sued the owners of the TextNow app for the identities of the users who threatened them. TextNow is an app that allows users to make phone calls and send text messages anonymously. However, the app does collect information about the user, including email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, and credit card numbers, along with logs of phone calls and text messages. In several instances, the app was used to harass the company’s employees anonymously. Now an Ontario judge has ruled that the company has to release the names of these users. Harassment like this is said to have resulted in Bungie limiting communication with fans.
In a statement, a spokesperson for TextNow said that the company had every intention to cooperate with the court on the matter. The ruling had been originally been filed on June 15th, but the judge held off on releasing his reasons due to the serious nature of the threats. While Bungie has addressed harassment in the past, the company had no comment on the ruling.
As mentioned above, Bungie has, as of late, been targeting those who harass and make threats against its employees. Recently, for example, the company launched a lawsuit against Destiny 2 streamer Luca “miffysworld” Leone for threatening to burn down the studio. The company has also vowed to support its employees in the light of Roe v. Wade being overturned in the United States.
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Source: The Record
