A group of seven lawmakers are sending a letter to the worldâs biggest video game companies tomorrow, asking each of them what steps theyâre taking to combat âharassment and extremismâ in online video games.
As Axios reports, the seven Democratic representativesâincluding Lori Trahan (Massachusetts), Katie Porter (California) and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregonâhave all co-signed a letter, which is looking to âbetter understand the processes you have in place to handle player reports of harassment and extremism encounters in your online games, and ask for consideration of safety measures pertaining to anti-harassment and anti-extremism.â
Unsurprisingly, the list includes companies like Activision Blizzard (Call of Duty, Overwatch), Microsoft (Xbox), Sony (PlayStation), Roblox, Take-Two Interactive (Grand Theft Auto, NBA 2K), Riot Games (League of Legends, Valorant), Epic (Fortnite) and Electronic Arts (Battlefield, FIFA & Madden).
Those are all massive international companies, most of them with thousands of employees spread out all over the world, and responsible for some of the planetâs most popular and enduring online games. To want to grill them, when so many of them are based in the USâor at least most popular in the USâis a pretty obvious move!
Hilariously, though, whoever put the list together of which companies to target has clearly just gone down a list of âmost popular games,â not âbiggest companies,â because among those titans of industry are Innersloth, the developers of Among Us.
Among Us may be a huge hit, but Innersloth are also a tiny team. How tiny? This tiny:
Innserslothâs website says the studio currently has 20 employees. I donât know how much theyâre going to be able to offer Congress, given their game has you playing as a cute little astronaut, doesnât have voice chat, and only lets players communicate via a menu of pre-written lines.
But then, nobody has to legally reply to the letter at allâitâs just a letter, so maybe they can just reply, âSorry, think this is meant for Xbox!â and get on with their day.