Right of reply of the Ankama company
“The Ankama company is particularly surprised by the article published on March 4, 2024 on the Gamekult.com site which mentions the article from La Voix du Nord published on March 1, 2024 on its site and repeats the comments made on March 4, 2024 on its site by the Union of Video Game Workers (STJV) regarding a judgment rendered almost a year earlier, on June 30, 2023.
The late response thus given to this judgment is all the more surprising as the decision relates to a certificate produced in court by a former employee (having benefited from a conventional termination in January 2019) and who himself reported facts old ones (some dating back more than ten years), which it should be noted that they had not led to any questioning of the company's liability.
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Contrary to what your article indicates, there were not several “procedures launched by Ankama”, which never attempted to obstruct the production of a certificate before an industrial tribunal. Furthermore, in this single procedure to which the SJTV refers, the industrial tribunal did not accept any of the allegations and criticisms of the certificate in question.
And the Ankama company was equally entitled to contest the content of this certificate, which it did within the framework of a separate procedure initiated before the judicial court of Lille, in civil (and not in criminal proceedings as it could have to do so if she had wanted to initiate a “SLAPP procedure” as your article wrongly claims.
In reality, in its 23 years of existence, this is the first time that the Ankama company has been obliged to challenge in court the content of a certificate produced before an industrial tribunal.
Disagreeing with the decision of June 30, 2023 of the Lille judicial court, the Ankama company appealed to the Douai Court of Appeal, which is now responsible for resolving this dispute and determining whether the certificate in question was established in the compliance with the applicable regulations which require reporting only exact facts that the author must have personally observed, which is contested in this case.
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In this regard, the STJV having been created in 2017, it is appropriate to put its assessment into perspective when it believes it can be noted that this decision would be a first in the French video game industry.
Finally, your article wrongly asserts that the Ankama company has been “identified numerous times for its harmful practices” but does not specify which authority(ies) or impartial, trustworthy third party(ies) would have “ “pinned” the company nor what practices were involved and when they were committed or “pinned”. To our knowledge, no investigation supports these assertions.