Dangen Entertainment Warning

Disclaimers

I am writing these posts in the public interest, to warn people of my experiences with Dangen Entertainment and their CEO Ben Judd. It is my opinion that Dangen Entertainment and Ben Judd are predators that prey on indie game developers and young women, and I cannot in good conscience allow them to continue without leaving some public warning and evidence of their actions.

My intention is neither to profit personally nor to particularly seek financial harm against Dangen Entertainment, Ben Judd, or any other persons incidentally mentioned. I do not seek to financially harm game projects currently published by Dangen Entertainment.

Any games, developers, or people mentioned are only mentioned in the interest of providing the complete and true story to the public so that the public may be warned.

I hope that we are the last people who can be considered victims.

Identity of the Writer

I will not attach my name to these writings, but I will attest that I am not the lead developer of the Devil Engine (DE) or Fight Knight (FK) projects. Protoculture Games, Devil Engine’s lead developer, and any other persons associated with the projects mentioned are not responsible for these writings and have not approved of their disclosure. All information gathered from DE and FK was disclosed to me on a need-to-know basis as I was a key member of these projects at the time. Information from Ben Judd or Dangen Entertainment staff was collected by them volunteering information in my presence verbally or in text.

Table of Contents

This post will be incredibly long. I have added search codes (DW-###) to make it easier to jump to different spots.

• Ben Judd, CEO of Dangen Entertainment, Has a History of Abuse (DW-ben)
• Why is Ben Judd’s abusive behavior related to DE and FK? (DW-role)
• DE’s Troubled Release in February 2019 (DW-derel)
• FK’s Repeatedly Delayed Development (DW-fkdevdel)
• My First Meeting with Ben Judd at a Nightclub (DW-nightclub)
• Ben Judd Continues to Contact Me Privately and Often Breaks NDAs (DW-benda)
• Nayan Forgets to Put DE in the Steam Golden Week Sale (DW-goldenweek)
• Lying and Vague Communications with Third Party Publishers (DW-3rd)
• Lying To Third Parties About the FK Team (DW-fklies)
• Mismanaged and Unapproved Marketing to Nintendo (DW-nintdir)
• Dangen’s Focus On Self Promotion Rather Than Game Promotion (DW-selfpromo)
• Ben Judd Demands I Go To Bitsummit (DW-invbit)
• Ben Considers Firing Nayan (DW-firingnayan)
• The Late Night Phone Call in May (DW-mayphone)
• Ben Judd Tries To Force Me To Meet Him In Person (DW-lostvoice)
• The Contract Intended to Backdoor Copyright Over My Work (DW-contract)
• DE’s Royalties Payment (DW-deroyalty)
• Withholding Taxes Between Japan and USA (DW-wht)
• I Never Receive Proof of Payment of Tax from Dangen (DW-proof)
• FK’s Contract Termination (DW-fkterm)
• Dangen Uses Our Music Without Our Permission (DW-musicsteal)
• Why Are Other Games Not Affected? (DW-othergames)
• DE and FK Collaborators Go Unpaid (DW-collab)
• On DE Dev’s “Toxic” Behavior (DW-toxic)
• An Attempt At A Summary (DW-summary)

Ben Judd, CEO of Dangen Entertainment, Has a History of Abuse (DW-ben)

These tweets were posted publicly on August 28th, 2019. I recognized Alex and knew them to be in former contact with Ben Judd, meaning their claims were likely to be true. And, due to similar bad feelings I had about my experiences with Ben Judd, I privately reached out to them. We quickly established that we’d had very similar experiences. (I would like to clarify that I was never in a romantic or sexual relationship with Ben Judd. I kept my interactions with Ben Judd as business-oriented and professional as possible.) Alex was horrified to learn that Ben was still preying on young women. This inspired them to search for records of what happened, and they recovered e-mails from Ben Judd at the beginning of their relationship.

They sent me screencaps of Ben Judd switching from his work e-mail to a personal e-mail to sexually proposition them.

I was amazed because Ben Judd had said similar things to me, almost verbatim. He never explicitly sexually propositioned me, but he often talked about how he was a shy country boy from Ohio at heart, a nerd who forced himself into acting lessons to overcome his social anxiety, a washed up older man who just wanted to connect with fellow gamer women, etc. I knew instantly that these e-mails were from Ben Judd, and I realized belatedly that Ben Judd had treated me in a similar manner as one of his former victims.

This discovery led Alex to post another thread on Twitter on August 29, 2019.

Why is Ben Judd’s abusive behavior related to DE and FK? (DW-role)

FK’s lead developer was approached by Dangen with a free Japanese translation of his Kickstarter demo. This impressed him and he soon signed on officially with Dangen shortly after the Kickstarter campaign successfully concluded.

I worked on the DE project, before it was called “Devil Engine”, before we became friends with the FK team. The FK team had had good experiences with Dangen thus far and recommended them as a publisher for the DE project. DE signed with Dangen early 2018, and both the DE and FK teams had positive experiences with Dangen for most of 2018.

In December 2018, Nayan approached the lead developer of FK to renegotiate the FK contract to include Chinese localization. This prompted the FK dev to express concerns about a loophole he had noticed that allowed Dangen to charge whatever they liked to FK’s expenses without his approval. I looked over the contract and found many more such concerning clauses, so I rewrote the FK contract and negotiated its terms with Nayan. I explained each new clause carefully to Nayan in a voice call. He found no problem with any of the revisions and it was quickly approved and countersigned by Ben Judd, the CEO of Dangen.

Another developer friend of ours was also looking for a publisher. I offered to negotiate his contract as well, and we successfully pitched and signed a deal with Dangen in late January 2019.

I was now a part of three projects signed with Dangen.

DE’s Troubled Release in February 2019 (DW-derel)

DE was ready to be released on PC and Switch in October 2018. Nayan Ramachandran, the Dangen employee in charge of our teams’ developer relations, claimed that DE’s release would have to wait until February 2019. He claimed that they would not be able to finish the backend paperwork necessary to approve DE with Switch. Nayan also felt that Dangen needed more time to prepare marketing for DE. The lead developer was disappointed, but agreed to wait.

Towards the end of 2018 and into the beginning of 2019, the DE project began to have legal troubles with a third party publisher that Dangen had signed with. The situation was quickly deteriorating, and Nayan ignored most of our repeated requests for help.

By the time of DE’s release, Dangen refused to upload the soundtrack to Steam. They demanded that we wait for them to finish setting up the Dangen Bandcamp account so that they could simultaneously release the soundtrack there. They blamed the setup process of a Japanese Paypal business account for the delay.

We pointed out that Bandcamp accounts can collect money without a Paypal account, so there was absolutely no need to wait. We also pointed out that we were the only game Dangen had released in 2019, the only game Dangen was planning to release since Witch’s House’s release in October 2018, and that we had been delayed until February 2019 specifically for Dangen to prepare proper marketing and release support.

Other composers working on Dangen projects expressed concerns that the OST and OST bundle were not available at launch, and told Dangen in the shared #lounge server of the Slack that composers relied on sales of the OST and OST bundles for a majority of their income.

We were forced to wait a few weeks before finally being allowed to upload the soundtrack and bundle to Steam. I have no way of knowing how much money we lost due to this delay. All the while, Dangen staff continued their couch gamer streams which typically drew crowds of two (2) viewers.

As of this writing, Dangen has not sent us a single cent of money from the Bandcamp sales of the DE OST.

FK’s Repeatedly Delayed Development (DW-fkdevdel)

The FK project was also plagued with similar problems. Nayan and other Dangen staff’s lack of communication and in some cases outright lying regularly derailed the development schedule.

ONE// KFG (a popular gaming stream) requested a new and exclusive trailer of FK for a winter 2018 trailer reveal event they were organizing. FK dev requested Nayan forward him the email detailing the requirements for the trailer (length, formatting, etc) but never received a forward. FK dev put aside working on the last level of the game in order to put a week into creating this trailer.

Later, Nayan suddenly claimed that we had only a few hours to create an additional video of the lead developer speaking into the camera. The lead developer woke up, rearranged his room, prepared adequate lighting, and shot multiple takes for KFG to use. In the end, this video was never used in the KFG event.

When the KFG stream aired and other developers’ videos were played, the DE dev mentioned he would’ve hated to make such a video. Nayan admitted that DE was also asked to submit such a video, but that Nayan hadn’t bothered asking because he knew the DE dev would dislike it. So what was worded as a sudden, urgent, and important request to FK was actually entirely optional and never communicated to DE at all.

TWO// When Nayan requested a renegotiation of the FK contract to include Chinese localization, he forgot to use the original FK contract and instead simply edited a boilerplate Dangen contract with all of the original negotiated clauses reverted. The FK dev had spent $400 of his own money on having a lawyer look over the original contract. He was upset, but considering the original lawyer had missed many loopholes in the contract, we turned what would’ve been a very sour note into an opportunity to fully revise the contract from scratch. I wrote an entirely new contract superseding all previous clauses agreed to and input many protections for the FK dev.

THREE// Dangen was planning to show FK at a games exposition in Taiwan. Dangen requested a new Chinese Switch build of the game. FK dev again had to put off finishing the last level of the game in order to get Chinese fonts working in GameMaker Studio 2. I assisted in locating suitable royalty-free Chinese fonts and advised on readability. We requested assistance multiple times from Dangen about Chinese localization, such as inquiring whether it was possible to have the title rhyme in Chinese and requesting Chinese copy to place on the Steam page, and we received no response from any Dangen staff. Dangen staff requested our Steam wishlist numbers so they could measure the impact of the Taiwan event, and we provided the wishlist numbers promptly. Again, we offered to place Chinese copy on Steam to assist Dangen’s marketing efforts, and again received no response.

In general, compiling a new console build before the final PC master copy of the game is done requires weeks of painstaking troubleshooting and bug fixing. Ultimately preparing the Taiwan demo took half a month away from completing the game. We saw little to no change in wishlists from this event, which is unsurprising considering a Chinese localization of the Steam page was never prepared.

My First Meeting with Ben Judd at a Nightclub (DW-nightclub)

Ben Judd finally reached out to me to discuss these many issues in March 2019. We’d always had the impression that Ben Judd was too busy for Dangen due to his real full time job as the Vice President of Digital Development Management Agency Japan. DDMA is an agency that deals with AAA game companies on huge games such as Metal Wolf Chaos, Sekiro, and Mighty Number 9. Ben Judd reaching out to me felt like a breakthrough and a breath of fresh air after being repeatedly ignored by Nayan and other Dangen staff for months.

Ben invited me to a nightclub where he had arranged for DE’s music to be played for a promotional event. I was under the impression our discussion would be about the issues plaguing the DE release, as well as some concerns the FK team had.

When we met, we discussed business for about 5 minutes, and then he changed the topic to my personal life. He complimented my “skill sets” and asked me many personal questions about my background and my future career plans.

He also asked me about my romantic life, and specifically asked if I was dating developers he knew that I was working with. When I said that I wasn’t dating any of those people, he asked me what I thought about dating in “nerd communities”.

He said something to the effect of, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a very attractive young woman. How exactly would a shy, nervous nerdy guy ask you if you’re interested in dating without offending you?”

I was confused about the topic. Ben Judd is quite a bit older than me, and I was only attending the club event to discuss business matters with him… I mildly replied that there was no harm in asking a woman if she’s interested, but that it was important to be respectful if she replied negatively to romantic advances. I also mentioned dating people you also work with is generally a bad idea, especially in the games industry which is very small and developer lives are often in the public eye.

This answer seemed to frustrate Ben, and he exclaimed “how’s a guy supposed to date anybody if you’re not allowed to let a girl know she’s attractive to you?” and some things about how hard it is for men to date. I felt the conversation was very strange, but continued to assert that there was no harm in just politely asking a woman if she was interested in dating so long as you respected her saying no. The topic of dating seemed very sensitive for him and I wanted to change the subject.

Ben Judd Continues to Contact Me Privately and Often Breaks NDAs (DW-benda)

After this event, I was often contacted by Ben Judd privately and asked to speak with him about the projects I worked on, either by phone or in person. Later conversations tended to be more professional, but I often was regaled with unsolicited random NDA stories about his DDMA work.

Please note that I am not sharing these details to damage the reputations of the companies in question. I am only sharing these details so that these companies, DDMA, and any past, current, or future business associates of Ben Judd are aware that he cannot be trusted with sensitive information. I do not know or frankly care about the veracity of any of these stories, and they may be fabricated or exaggerated by Ben Judd.

Various stories Ben Judd told me:

• The CEO of Playism is, in Ben’s words, “a cheap asshole” who forced Nayan and Dan Stern (another Dangen employee) to sleep in net cafes instead of allowing them to sleep in proper accomodations on business trips. He brought this up to explain why he always made sure to accomodate people in proper hotel rooms when I requested funds for my stay at Bitsummit 2019.
• Unties, Sony’s indie games publishing branch, is going bankrupt. I was apparently told this so Ben could express how difficult the indie market is for publishers. He claimed that even a giant company like Sony had no choice but to be subject to the whims of the market.
• He was working on the deal for Sekiro between Activision and FromSoftware. According to him, Activision and FromSoftware hate each other. This was a story shared with me to explain why he was tired and late to a meeting.
• Devolver and FromSoftware hate each other because Devolver failed to properly handle withholding tax forms for Metal Wolf Chaos, causing millions of dollars and months of unnecessary loss.

• 505 made mistakes when releasing Bloodstained that will cost Koji Igarashi millions of dollars.

As relations between Dangen and all of my dev teams deteriorated, I was forced to devote more and more unpaid manhours towards defusing problems caused by Dangen’s lack of communications, lying, and incompetence. I had to stay polite and neutral as Dangen’s behavior became increasingly less acceptable, and I had to repeatedly speak with Ben in private over phone or text and endure his repeated and empty stories about being “an older man who just wants to do right by young and vulnerable indie developers”.

Nayan Forgets to Put DE in the Steam Golden Week Sale (DW-goldenweek)

The various problems of the DE release, some of which I omitted for brevity/clarity, frustrated and angered the team. However, overall DE seemed to be extremely successful and was very well received. Ben Judd verbally shared the sales data with me in person. If I recall correctly, the sales data he shared with me was roughly 3,000 units sold during launch month. He said this vastly exceeded Dangen’s expectations.

Nayan asked if DE would like to be included in the Steam Golden Week sale. Golden Week is sort of like Christmas in Japan, it’s the nation’s most popular holiday season. As Japan was probably DE’s biggest and most supportive market, the DE dev of course said yes to this.

However, when the Steam Golden Week sale went up, DE was not included. Nayan had forgotten to submit DE into the Steam Golden Week sale during the signup period, something that could have been done within 5 minutes at any time between when Nayan asked DE for approval and when the signups closed weeks later.

As an aside, Dangen staff almost always had some excuse about why they couldn’t answer in a reasonable timeframe. They often blamed timezone differences, claimed they were out of office, or on some sort of company holiday. If developers had a question on Wednesday night, it often went unanswered until the next Tuesday, if it was ever answered at all.

Meanwhile, many of us had Nayan added on Discord/PS4 and could see him playing Destiny or other AAA games while ignoring our requests.

Golden Week 2019 was famously one of the longest Golden Weeks ever due to the changing of emperors. Dangen staff of course took almost half a month off and completely ignored any requests during the first half of May. This meant that Dangen staff were completely unavailable in the month leading into Bitsummit, one of their biggest promotional events in Japan.

However, before leaving for half a month on Golden Week vacation, Dangen made sure to travel around Osaka filming themselves drinking in bars and talking about videogames to celebrate their anniversary! This stream was populated by roughly twenty (20) viewers, a majority of whom were Dangen developers. It currently has 115 views on Youtube.

The DE team was furious and upset. A majority of the launch mistakes in February 2019 could’ve been forgiven as the growing pains of a new publisher. However, putting a game into a Steam sale is something the DE dev could have easily done himself if he’d been given access to it. DE dev was forgiving and understanding of Dangen’s failings up until this point, but this was the beginning of the end of any trust he had left for Dangen.

Lying and Vague Communications with Third Party Publishers (DW-3rd)

A third party publisher reached out and notified us that Nayan had treated them extremely poorly. They claimed that they had been attempting to speak with Dangen for months about publishing DE on physical media, but that Nayan had simply given them vague answers and wasted quite a bit of their time. They asked us whether we were interested in them as a physical media publisher, whether we were even aware of their attempts to contact us, and whether the vague communications were coming from us.

Ben Judd reached out to me in my PMs in order to discuss this latest problem.

The call resulted in Nayan and the rest of Dangen staff being told to forward all communications regarding any projects I was on to me. I received multiple offers from third party publishers interested in releasing DE on physical media from months prior that we were not made aware of at all.

There were at least four third party physical media and merchandise publishers that had reached out to us. I have no way of knowing if there are more. None of these opportunities were communicated to the DE team or followed up on properly by Nayan. I took over as the third party publisher negotiator, a task that grated on me immensely as Dangen still demanded they receive 40% revenue share of any such third party deals, regardless of the reality that Dangen’s involvement had actively been a detriment to the proceedings and caused harm to our reputation.

Lying To Third Parties About the FK Team (DW-fklies)

A third party publisher asked FK if there were new assets available for their designers to use. Instead of simply waiting for the lead developer to respond himself, and instead of asking the lead developer, Nayan completely fabricated an answer without consulting the developer at all.

At this time it would’ve been impossible to make a July release. Also, there were no plans to make a new trailer. Since Nayan fabricated this information, we couldn’t reasonably correct him in communications with the third party publisher without giving the impression that we were unreliable and not in control of our development schedule.

FK dev decided to confront Nayan and Ben Judd about this a month later.

Nayan replied asking for a new estimate of the FK release schedule. FK dev further clarified:

Nayan then later privately messaged FK dev to fully apologize.

Mismanaged and Unapproved Marketing to Nintendo (DW-nintdir)

Early in April Nayan yet again had a sudden and urgent request for a new Nintendo Switch build of FK. (This would mark perhaps the fifth or sixth time Dangen asked for a console build suddenly in the middle of development.)

Nayan claimed that his contact at Nintendo had seen a previous build Dangen had sent in and loved FK and wanted to see more.

FK dev asked what exactly Nintendo wanted to see in the new build and when it was due by. He was in the middle of doing important file system restructuring and putting this on hold to create a Switch build of the game would severely delay the completion of the game and would ultimately be wasted work.

If Nintendo wanted to see Switch exclusive features as well, while the FK dev had ideas on what he wanted to implement, he was busy focusing on finishing the PC version of the game as his primary obligation to his Kickstarter backers and would not have time to implement any Switch exclusive features depending on when Nintendo wanted to see the new build by.

Further, FK dev had no idea that Dangen had pitched FK to Nintendo directly. All marketing decisions such as this are subject to approval by the developer. This meant that Dangen had sent in a build of FK that the developer would have considered unfinished and unpolished, without any regard to his schedule, without any coordination so he could fully support the marketing effort, to the company the FK dev arguably wanted to impress the most. Had Dangen coordinated with FK prior to pitching to Nintendo, he could’ve created a special build with exclusive Switch features. Instead, he was being forced to delay the completion of the PC build once again in order to quickly slap together a subpar Switch build of the 90% version of the game.

Nayan had no details on what Nintendo wanted to see and claimed that the FK dev should have the new build ready by Friday, April 19, 2019. FK dev asked again, had this contact at Nintendo actually seen the previous Switch build sent and did they really need a new build? Nayan said yes, they had already seen the previous Switch build and needed a new build.

FK dev didn’t want to squander what he thought was a direct request from Nintendo, so he reluctantly switched tracks away from completing the PC build once again and began working on a new Switch build. He wasted the majority of the month of April struggling to make the save/load systems work, with no success.

I began to ask for clarification on FK dev’s behalf while he struggled to complete the new Switch build. I asked which “Nintendo” was even asking — was it Nintendo of America or Nintendo of Japan? Who was Nayan’s contact at Nintendo? Did they speak English or Japanese? Did they need an updated Japanese localization? But Nayan ultimately admitted he was never in direct contact with Nintendo at all; Ben was.

I had a call with Ben Judd to discuss the issue. I summarized the contents of the call to FK dev on Discord.

Essentially, Ben confirmed that Nayan had entirely fabricated his story about having a contact at Nintendo who loved FK and had requested a new Switch build. Ben also admitted that the save/load system FK dev had been working on was unimportant.

FK dev wrote this message to the Dangen FK Slack channel as well. Ben reached out to him to have a phone call.

The FK dev summarized his recollection of what Ben said in the phone call shortly after to me on Discord as well. The contents of the call were largely the same as the conversation I had with Ben.

FK dev turned in the new Switch build on Friday, April 29, 2019. We never heard back on whether this was sent to Nintendo or what the result was.

Dangen’s Focus On Self Promotion Rather Than Game Promotion (DW-selfpromo)

Instead of forwarding journalists to developers for interviews, Dangen Entertainment often fields the interviews themselves and focuses a majority of the questions and content on their role in publishing and localizing the games. As basic support for their games fell by the wayside, this obvious self-aggrandizing bent to Dangen’s marketing began chafing on a majority of the developers under them. There was an impression that Dangen Entertainment was more interested in promoting their image as a” struggling startup indie games publisher staffed entirely by foreigners in Japan” rather than promoting the actual games being published by them.

Above is a random selection of news articles about Dangen Entertainment. There are many more similar articles to be found by basic searching.

The GamesIndustry.biz article has a particularly misleading quote, if not an outright lie, from Dan Stern.

“Like most publishers, Dangen makes money off royalties on the sales of games it publishes. And that’s the only way, Stern clarifies, adding that he doesn’t feel right about charging developers separately for every individual service that Dangen provides, whether it’s dev support, localization, or porting.”

This, however, is completely false. Dangen charges developers for localizations, and these charges are calculated completely separately from their share of royalties. These localization costs must be paid to Dangen before developers begin to see revenue share. For games with extremely long scripts, localization costs can be almost $25,000 USD per language — a huge burden which could mean that some developers may never see royalties accrue.

Personally, I don’t think this is unfair, and I think it is up to developers to carefully assess whether localizing to given languages is worth the cost and risk. I don’t understand why Dan Stern specifically felt the need to lie in this article about Dangen not charging developers for localization.

Dangen’s Twitter and other social media marketing is run by Chad Porter, aka “Chyadosensei”. His personal Youtube channel has a history spanning back 8 years, with view counts averaging in the double digits. As of this writing, he has 2,050 subscribers and 719 videos.

Chyadosensei posted two videos called Kickstarter Indie Games FAIL and Kickstarter Indie Games FAIL #2 between June 29, 2018 and July 17, 2018. They are strangely meanspirited videos where he looks through indie game Kickstarters that had failed to reach their funding goals and make fun of them.

Shortly after Chad Porter joined Dangen staff, Dangen began devoting at least six hours a week to gamer couch streams of multiple Dangen staff members playing video games. Sometimes Dangen staff would play video games being published by Dangen, but often times Dangen staff would simply be playing random video games, or “IRL” stream themselves drinking and enjoying the nightlife of Osaka. These streams typically receive viewership in the single digits.

These streams were always particularly embarrassing and baffling to the developers being published by Dangen, but since viewership was so low, their embarrassing nature didn’t particularly matter so long as basic developer support remained decent. But, like the news articles, when developer support fell by the wayside, the devotion of Dangen staff to running these unsuccessful streams over answering developer requests in a timely manner became extremely grating and frustrating.

Ben Judd Demands I Go To Bitsummit (DW-invbit)

Ben asked if I could go to Bitsummit 2019. After some thought, I decided to decline due to the expense.

Ben said that it was absolutely critical that I be at Bitsummit as a representative member of three development teams. He agreed to pay for my travel expenses, time off from work, and hotel.

I was worried about spending too much money, so I asked him about how much the budget was for my sleeping accomodations. He told me a story about the president of Playism being a cheap asshole who forced Nayan and Dan Stern to sleep in net cafes, and that because of that he always makes sure to give people nice hotel rooms. He then claimed that a young lady like me would probably not want to sleep in the Dangen staff Airbnb “around a bunch of stinky guys who snore”, so I should feel free to pay any price and book a nice hotel room to myself.

I was a little confused why he had assumed I was asking to sleep in the Dangen staff hotel room, but by this time I was used to Ben saying odd things like this. I decided to book a room in an Airbnb run by a nice old woman where many other young developers were staying for Bitsummit.

After I booked the Airbnb and sent the invoice to Ben, he suddenly ignored me and I received no money for my Bitsummit expenses. Nayan claimed that due to the Japanese banking system, they were unable to send money unless it was on Fridays. I had to ask multiple times until I finally received my Bitsummit expenses a few days before Bitsummit on a Sunday, weeks after my initial request.

Ben Considers Firing Nayan (DW-firingnayan)

Around this time, other Dangen developers also had similar complaints and stories about Nayan’s laziness, incompetence, and lies. Most of our problems on the DE and FK teams were due to Nayan, and I would often report on these issues to Ben Judd, but I had always avoided directly blaming Nayan by name to avoid seeming combative.

After the third party publisher reached out to the DE team, Ben Judd asked me to get on a phone call on May 11, 2019. He said he was about to board a plane for America at 5pm to attend GDC 2019 but wanted to have a frank talk about the issues on the DE project.

I had initially detailed the DE teams’ complaints without naming Nayan in order to avoid seeming combative as usual. Ben expressed that he’d already had a few talks with Nayan about his lack of “detail orientation” before. He asked me for more information about grievances against Nayan, so I verbally explained a few off the top of my head. I also mentioned that I’d heard complaints about Nayan from other Dangen developers as well, but I avoided identifying them per their requests.

Ben seemed horrified, and began saying he was strongly considering not only severing Nayan’s relationship with Dangen, but bringing me in to take Nayan’s place. He requested that I send him a writeup of our grievances against Nayan in an email so that he could read over it carefully on the plane. He also requested that I collect more complaints about Nayan from the development teams that wished to stay anonymous so that he could address them without making these development teams uncomfortable.

I followed his request and quickly compiled my teams’ grievances against Nayan. I also offered suggestions I thought would improve the situation for Dangen.

I also addressed some concerns I had on the possibility of me joining Dangen officially as staff.

The Late Night Phone Call in May (DW-mayphone)

I began stepping in on all third party negotiations. Issues with Nayan continued as his lack of diligence affected preparations for Bitsummit 2019.

The week after GDC 2019 ended and Ben had returned to Japan, I reached out to him to see what he’d decided to do about our grievances with Nayan.

Ben agreed to call me at 10pm that night.

Ben began the call by claiming that DE dev’s communications with the Dangen team were getting hard for them to field. I lightly replied, “Yeah, he can get a little spicy sometimes.”

Ben spat out, “He’s not spicy, he’s toxic.” I was taken aback. Ben had never had such a bitter or angry tone with me before.

I said that while I understood that the mood between developers and Dangen had soured immensely in the past few months, I still could not fault developers for being upset with Dangen’s mishandling of their projects thus far. I brought up how terrible the Nintendo fiasco had been for FK, and how clear and honest communication could’ve avoided a lot of trouble.

Ben snapped that if FK’s dev couldn’t be satisfied with Dangen’s service as is, then he would have to consider dropping support for DE. Ben claimed that while they had had a lot of great opportunities lined up for FK, such as Google Stadia, Epic Games Store, and Nintendo Direct, if our contract stipulated that they had to come to us with “granular” approvals all the time, then they would have to allow such opportunities to pass us by.

I was completely apalled at this point. The DE team had not received ANY of their revshare yet, and he was using this to threaten the FK team into giving up their oversight over Dangen’s marketing activities.

I asserted that DE and FK were two very different projects led by two very different people, and that though I worked on both projects, they should not be confused with each other. I told him I didn’t understand why he would hold one project’s behavior against the other like that.

Ben continued angrily, “Look, I see what you’re doing. You’re running around behind Nayan’s back, trying to ruin his life, digging up gossip about him. It needs to stop. I will not tolerate my team being treated like this.”

I distinctly remembered Ben being the one to suggest that Nayan should be fired, and I had only collected grievances against Nayan by Ben’s own request. I brought this up, and Ben suddenly changed tone back to complimentary.

“I’ve been very impressed with you. I think there’s a real opportunity here at Dangen for you,” Ben said.

I didn’t understand what my being employed with Dangen or not had to do with the conversation at hand. I said I was flattered but as I was already under contract with another employer, I would have to consider any job offer carefully.

“Do you want to be an [####] forever? Is that what you want?” Ben asked me aggressively.

I said that while I was interested in working in the games industry, I had also spent quite a bit of time and money training to be competent in my current career, and that I took pride in doing a good job, no matter the work, and finishing what I had promised.

Ben abruptly claimed that it was late at night and that he had to tuck his daughter into bed, and that we should finish this discussion later. I had never heard about his daughter before this call.

Later, a friend of mine mentioned that Nayan had tweeted bragging about drinking all night with Ben. He also tweeted about how he thought it a shame that men were discouraged from showing platonic affection to each other.

The Meeting Before Bitsummit Where Ben Tries to Hire Me (DW-bitmeet)

Ben suddenly requested that I change our Bitsummit meeting location from Kyoto (where Bitsummit is) to Osaka at Dangen’s offices. As I didn’t want to refuse and have things sour further on my projects, I agreed.

When I arrived at the office building, behind me all of the Dangen staff happened to be coming back from lunch. Many of them recognized me, but nobody greeted me. I told them that I was there for a meeting with Ben. They seemed confused, as if they didn’t know I was coming, then finally suggested that Ben was upstairs.

When I went upstairs, Ben quickly had me leave my suitcase in the office and led me outside to a cafe far away from the office building. He said that he wanted to go somewhere where Dangen staff would not be able to overhear us.

I asked if I could record the meeting’s audio on my phone for my personal notes. At several points over the past year, Ben had agreed to one thing verbally, then claimed I had agreed to something else entirely. I wanted proof of our conversation in case this happened again. Ben agreed to the recording.

Ben began mostly by claiming that he would like to pay my teams in order to make their various grievances right. To the FK team he promised $400 to pay for legal fees, since Nayan had lost the original FK contract that had been negotiated by FK’s lawyer and sent a boilerplate instead. To the DE team, he promised that a calculation would be made to approximate the lost revenue from Nayan forgetting to place DE in the Steam Golden Week Sale.

He then said that I had impressed him over the past months, and that he would like to formally offer me a job with Dangen. He claimed they couldn’t afford to hire me full time, so I would continue working as I mostly already was, for the sum of 50,000 yen (roughly $500 USD) per month. By this point, completely unpaid by Dangen and working only for revshare from my development teams, I was fielding all third party offers and negotiating all developer requests for three separate projects. I also assisted with translation, interpretation, communications with musicians and collaborators, coordinating interviews with press, marketing campaign strategy, and copy editing.

I knew Nayan’s salary must be around 300,000 yen (roughly $3000 USD) per month in order to meet the requirements for Japanese residency status. I was being offered one sixth of what Nayan was paid in order to do a majority of Nayan’s job for him.

This would free Nayan up to pursue his more “creative” side, which Ben felt Nayan excelled at more than the “detail-oriented” paperwork he’d been tasked with thus far.

Ben also stressed that he was very eager to finally hire a minority woman onto the team, and that he had been looking to make his company more diverse. He lamented that ever since John Davis, a former Dangen employee who is black, had left the company, there was little diversity on the team.

I suggested that perhaps my skills should be more important than my race or my gender. Ben insisted that diversity was important, as different backgrounds meant different opinions, and this would strengthen the company.

I asked Ben to let me think about the job offer. I said I would let him know after Bitsummit. He invited me to a pre-Bitsummit dinner party that Dangen staff would be attending, and I declined, since I had to check in to my Airbnb in Kyoto.

Ben Judd Tries To Force Me To Meet Him In Person (DW-lostvoice)

Considering I was already doing a majority of Nayan’s work for free, I figured being paid $500 per month for this service was “better than nothing”. Since I already negotiated multiple contracts with Ben Judd in the past, I was confident I could negotiate my own employment contract to my satisfaction. I accepted Ben’s job offer under the assumption that any critical issues would be worked out during contract negotiation.

Ben Judd was busy with E3 and DDMA work, so he did not follow up on my contract until DE’s royalties were due on July 1st.

I agreed to an in person meeting with Ben Judd on Thursday, July 4, 2019. However, I became ill and lost my voice.

Despite my being ill and having lost the physical ability to speak, Ben refused to send me the contract via e-mail. He claimed he was uncomfortable negotiating contracts in text and felt that I was starting our working relationship with a defensive tone.

I repeated that I was physically incapable of speaking and would be unable to have an in person or voice meeting, and that even in the case of such meetings, I would still prefer time to have read the contract beforehand and prepare my thoughts. I also refused to accept payment or work before these contract negotiations were completed. He suggested that he didn’t have the money to negotiate the contract in such a manner, and I reminded him that I had already written and negotiated multiple other contracts for Dangen before like this.

Roughly a week later, Ben finally sent me a contract.

The Contract Intended to Backdoor Copyright Over My Work (DW-contract)

This portion of the contract stipulated that any work I had ever done (“heretofore”) and any work I would ever do (“heretoafter”) would be deemed the “Work Product”. The definition of Work Product included, without limitation, any drawings, writings, code, suggestions, jokes, etc. Basically, Dangen could claim anything I did or said was a “Work Product”.

This clause of the contract gives Dangen the right to register copyright for everything I had ever done and everything I would ever do (the “Work Product”) and entitle them to all income or royalties arising from the use of said Work Product, forever (“in perpetuity”). Even if such work would not fall under the United States Copyright Act’s definition of “work for hire”, I would still transfer my rights to my work to Dangen, forever (“in perpetuity”) and “irrevocably”.

Because of the extensive amount of work I had already done on FK and DE, this would essentially backdoor Dangen’s copyright over significant portions of these games.

Also, for at least one year after I had completed work for Dangen, I would not be allowed to contact anybody published or working with Dangen.

Ben also sent me a message on Slack stressing that I should endeavor to not discuss Dangen’s “internal issues” with developers.

Ben asserted that though this contract was written by DDMA’s law firm and that therefore it was “just about as standard as it comes with contracts”, he stated “flexibility is my middle name” and agreed to allow me to write my own contract instead.

I decided to wait until DE’s royalties were properly paid.

DE’s Royalties Payment (DW-deroyalty)

We were promised our royalties on July 1st, 2019, after Q2 (April 1st to June 30th) ended. This would include our Q1 (January 1st to March 31st) sales as well.

On July 1st, DE’s lead developer asked where his money was.

Nayan suddenly claimed that he would not receive royalty reports from Nintendo until the 16th. I don’t know if this is true or not, and considering all the other lies Nayan had told me and my teams about Nintendo’s processes, his claims fell on deaf ears with DE’s lead developer.

Nayan reached out to me privately to ask me to mediate the situation.

I asked DE dev to discuss his grievances with me and summarized them for Nayan.

After much discussion with DE dev, we ultimately decided it’d be easier to wait until July 16th and invoice Dangen for both Q1 and Q2’s royalties in the same payment.

On July 16th, Nayan sent Q1 and Q2’s royalty statements as promised. Considering the subpar quality of most of Dangen’s other work, I assumed the statements would have errors and carefully inspected them. After analyzing thousands of lines of sales reports, I realized that the sales for our launch month in the Japan region were missing. This should have represented our biggest market.

I asked Nayan about it. He immediately apologized and sent me a corrected report restoring Japan region sales within a few minutes. The missing sales data was roughly $7,000 USD.

I also noticed that Dangen had charged us an additional 8% tax on their business expenses, such as booking space at American gaming conventions. There were unapproved expenses such as roughly $1,000 USD spent on Twitter advertisements, and the 8% tax meant we paid an additional $80 to Dangen for this.

I did not want to debate these smaller expenses and risk Dangen withholding our funds even longer, so I invoiced Dangen for our due royalties according to the statements they gave me.

DE and FK never received funding or porting support from Dangen. DE dev created the port for DE’s Switch version without assistance from Dangen staff.

Withholding Taxes Between Japan and USA (DW-wht)

“Withholding taxes” are taxes taken from income (wages, royalties, etc) by the person who pays the income. In America, typically an employer will withhold income from their employee and pay this income directly to the government. They give their employee a form called a W2 which proves that the employer paid this money to the government. This W2 contains information on which company paid how many taxes for which employee, and gives the employee all the information and proof they need to apply for a tax refund from the government. The employee takes the W2 and files it with the government and is generally entitled to a refund if, depending on their circumstances, the employee did not actually owe the government the full amount that was withheld from their wages.

In Japanese, withholding tax is called 源泉徴収 or “source-based tax”. Paying withholding tax properly is the responsibility of the “source” of the funds, not the recipient.

However, the withheld taxes are paid from what is ultimately the recipient’s money. Calculating withholding tax properly is difficult and complicated, and because the source does not receive any more money whether they calculate withholding tax properly at all, it is common for employers to simply take the maximum withholding tax possible to avoid any responsibility.

Under Article 14 of the US-Japan tax treaty, royalties from Japan sent to the US should not be taxed more than 10% by Japan. Without applying for this tax treaty, Japanese withholding tax on royalties for foreign corporations is 20.42%. I looked up the forms required to apply for this reduced withholding tax and requested Dangen file them, as they were the source.

Dangen delayed payment indefinitely again, claiming that they didn’t know exactly how to file or calculate withholding tax for a US-based developer. They largely ignored the research and forms I had already provided them.

I decided to reach out to Ben to try and understand why Dangen had never expected to pay a developer based in the United States a significant amount of money and why Dangen did not have a process put in place to properly pay their developers in a timely manner. DE was delayed from October 2018 release, ultimately released in February 2019, and we had been delayed payment until July 2019. They’d had almost six months from our game’s release to consider how to pay us royalties.

Ben avoided concretely answering my questions and claimed he would get me in touch with his accountant.

I was never put in touch with Dangen’s accountant.

I Never Receive Proof of Payment of Tax from Dangen (DW-proof)

By this point, we were all afraid Dangen would never send us any money at all. I decide I would rather have some of what was owed to us, rather than receive nothing at all while continuing to fruitlessly argue over how to pay withholding tax properly. I agreed to have Dangen pay 20.42% of our royalties to the Japanese government in withholding tax, so long as Dangen provided me proof of this payment so that I could file for a tax refund.

Dangen never provided me proof of payment. They claimed that this was not a form they were required to show to me. Without Dangen’s cooperation, I do not have the information I need to file for a tax refund of the withheld funds.

Also, without proof of the source of income, i.e. proof of payment of withholding tax from the source, banks in Japan refuse to send the funds I did receive overseas.

I ended up breaking up the funds into transactions small enough to not set off Japanese overseas bank transfer restrictions and have slowly dispersed the funds to DE’s team over the past half year.

Later, after it became widely rumored that Dangen had not provided proof of payment, Ben sent me a poorly made Word document with Dangen’s business address on it. This document does not contain any information to prove Dangen paid withholding tax to the government, such as the date the tax payment was made, the location of the tax office, a transaction number, official stamps from the tax office, etc.

FK’s Contract Termination (DW-fkterm)

FK dev wanted to terminate his agreement with Dangen in May, but considering Ben Judd’s threats towards the DE team, FK dev decided to wait until DE had received at least some of their royalties. When I confirmed the DE team had received some payment, FK dev notified Dangen that he had terminated his agreement with them on July 24th, 2019.

Dangen’s law firm sent FK dev a threatening letter a week later claiming they had evidence that all of FK dev’s frustrations were “misunderstandings” and that, “rest assured, Dangen is not prepared to relinquish any of its rights to publish and distribute the Game.” They also claimed that I had lied to FK dev, despite FK dev being the firsthand recipient and witness of a majority of his grievances.

They requested that FK dev email Ben Judd, and specifically not contact the law firm, in order to discuss these matters. Ben Judd and Nayan Ramachandran have, as of this writing, never attempted to e-mail, PM, or otherwise directly contact FK’s lead developer.

Dangen Uses Our Music Without Our Permission (DW-musicsteal)

A friend of ours took a video of Justin Pfeiffer using DE composer Joseph B.’s music without permission at Bitsummit 2019. I don’t recall an announcement prior or after this stating the source of the music. I don’t recall verbal or visual advertisement for DE anywhere during this event. We sent the video evidence of this to the DE composer, who was extremely upset by this complete lack of respect for his music. I recall him saying, “If Justin had just asked, I would’ve let him. Why didn’t he just ask?”

Dangen uploaded the entire soundtrack for DE to Youtube without our permission. We haven’t DMCAed these videos yet because their views are too small to bother with.

Dangen used one of FK’s tracks without the permission of us or our composer for a “Dangen Commercial” that didn’t even feature FK in it. This was posted on October 8, 2019, almost three months after we had told them we had terminated our agreement with them. Dangen treats games’ assets as if they’re free for their use, without regard to their contractual obligations to request permission and approval for specific marketing uses.

They also often ripped our trailers from our accounts and reuploaded them to their own accounts without our permission. Worse, they would title their upload the “Official Trailer”, causing confusion and robbing views from the developer’s version of the trailers.

Why Are Other Games Not Affected? (DW-othergames)

A majority of Dangen’s currently listed titles are not fully released and have not collected royalties yet.

Most other released Dangen games are only Japanese localizations in collaboration with their original publishers. Iconoclasts’ main publisher is Norway-based Bifrost Entertainment. CrossCode’s main publisher is Germany-based Deck13. The original publishers receive the royalties, calculate Dangen’s share from the Japanese localization, and send their royalties to Dangen. Dangen is not responsible for calculating revenue share and thus has no chance mishandle funds from these games.

DE is one of few games, perhaps the only game, in Dangen’s library that has been released and was due royalties from Dangen in 2019. Minoria’s royalties should be due sometime in mid-December 2019 and Bug Fables will be due their royalties in mid-March 2020. Perhaps Dangen will make an effort to hire a competent accountant and properly pay these developers now that attention is on whether or not they do so. In this way, we hope we can support Dangen developers who do not have the choice to leave or who have chosen to stay.

DE and FK Collaborators Go Unpaid (DW-collab)

• A promotional poster artist we commissioned for DE was not paid until after Dangen had returned from their half month Golden Week vacation. She was eventually paid, but she was unable to finish her poster in time for use for an announcement at Bitsummit 2019 as intended.
• Dangen refused to send all of the non-Japanese musicians of DE their full payment unless they agreed to sign separate additional contracts with Dangen. Considering my negative experience with Dangen’s collaborator contracts, I advised the musicians to allow Dangen to withhold 20% from their payments instead.
• While Dangen did not mind withholding 20% from other DE musicians’ payments, they pressured DE’s most famous musician collaborator for weeks to sign a separate contract. I finally stepped in and paid him myself with my personal funds. I did not want him to be pressured into signing an unfavorable contract, and I was personally embarrassed that funds were being withheld from such an important collaborator.
• I have not confirmed whether Dangen has paid all the translators and musicians who have worked on DE and FK.
• As of this writing, I was told by Dan Luffey that FK’s German translator has not received payment for her translation of FK. I hope to make contact with her and pay her for her work eventually, even though we will not be using Dangen’s translation work.

On DE Dev’s “Toxic” Behavior (DW-toxic)

For context, DE’s lead developer, out of all of the developers and teams I worked with, was actually the warmest and friendliest to Dangen. Most of the developers and teams I worked with generally found Dangen’s marketing efforts second hand embarrassing and only really communicated with Dangen staff when necessary.

Even after things had soured completely between a majority of Dangen staff and DE dev, well after release, he still had no harsh feelings towards Dangen staff that had not directly been involved with harming him.

I have tried to compile what Nayan may be referring to by “verbal abuse” and present it here with my notes on the context in which they occurred. Most of these screencaps are from the many times DE dev requested information on when his payment would finally be sent to him.

Justin Pfeiffer attempted to have Dangen musicians sign their rights to their music to him in order to create a Dangen Compilation Album. Dangen musicians were being offered 10% of the sales of this album. This album greatly insulted a majority of the Dangen musicians. At this time, DE dev still had not received any of his money.

I must admit it was also often difficult for me to criticize Dangen staff’s work or behavior without unintentionally seeming antagonistic.

An Attempt At A Summary (DW-summary)

I worked on three projects published by Dangen. Dangen’s general incompetence and repeated lying deteriorated their relationship with the teams I was on until they terminated their contracts with Dangen. My involvement and Ben Judd’s interest in me as an “attractive minority woman” may have contributed to these many issues. Alex’s public tweets about Ben Judd’s exploitive and sexually abusive behavior has alerted many Dangen developers to the fact that their games’ profits directly go to one of Ben Judd’s companies. (As far as I can tell, Dangen’s office address is registered to three separate companies in Japan: Digital Development Management Agency, Encapsulated Software, and Dangen Entertainment. This is publicly available information I repeat here in the public interest.)

While the DE dev may have expressed his frustrations with Dangen in less than professional ways, as witness to all of Dangen’s failings on his and other projects, I cannot blame DE dev for his impression that Dangen stole from him and his assumption that Dangen will steal from their other developers. I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone work with Dangen Entertainment or Ben Judd.

Dangen refuses to give DE dev back control of his Steam and Switch product pages. I have given up on ever receiving any further DE royalties from Q3 or Q4 and any proof they paid withholding tax to the Japanese government. Dangen continues to exploit DE and FK’s assets without approval.

Ben Judd requested that the DE dev only speak to Dangen staff with “yes” or “no” answers. DE dev is endeavoring to uphold this request.