Digital Development Management (DDM) has dismissed Ben Judd as Partner, Executive VP of DDM Japan. These actions were initiated by DDM as a direct result of the recent, serious allegations made against Ben. DDM takes workplace conduct and client confidentiality very seriously. DDM has now restructured its leadership team to address and accommodate the company's ongoing workload and client representation needs.
I'll see when the full thing drops (supposedly Monday), but I get the feeling DDM didn't give a single shit about Ben's sexual harassment stuff and mostly started getting blowback for Ben's NDA spilling habit. I kind of expected this, which is why I included all the NDA breaches he made to begin with, but even I'm a little surprised that it came to be this effective.
I had even more NDA stories Ben told me, but they either have already become public knowledge (Google Stadia) or frankly I had kind of started to ignore Ben whenever he started NDA storytime so I couldn't even remember the details. I do remember pretty clearly all the times he claimed two companies hated each other, especially how many times he brought up companies hating each other for withholding tax related reasons.
It makes me wonder how many of these soured relationships are actually a result of Ben's poor interpretation and bad communication, similar to what happened with FK and Nintendo. His own Discord username is "better than nothing" after his very famous interpretation fail where he inserted his own opinion about Mighty No. 9 as if it was Inafune's, causing a heavy drop to Inafune's reputation in the West. Many of the DDM deals Ben was on seem to be famous examples of mismanagement and bad communication between Japanese and Western studios as well.
But, that would be my own conjecture. I've done negotiations with other devs with other publishers before, and I've always been struck by how most publishers seem to be staffed primarily by mindless middlemen who have trouble thinking for themselves or even pushing e-mails around in a timely manner. This glut of frat boy bros drinking together and having a good time gossiping and flirting at game conventions as their primary method of "doing business" seems to be the rule, not the exception. Unfortunately, especially Nintendo Switch publishing access is completely obtuse and is the primary reason indie devs feel they have to kowtow to these perceived gatekeepers. Many would-be game developers and players have no idea about "how the sausage is made" in this sense and assume that access to Switch publishing is as easy as signing up.
I've seen so much abuse and exploitation already in my short time in this industry, and even now it pains me to have to keep secret all these stories that aren't mine to tell, that no one would believe me about because the names involved are often beloved "darlings" of the industry. I had to pick my battles, but I hope the fall from grace I've managed to inflict upon Ben Judd serves as warning to others like him.
You cannot compel a developer who you've already robbed everything from to give a shit about "NDA" or being blacklisted or being sued. I told Ben this frankly, and I suppose he took this as an empty threat from a scared girl rather than an honest statement of fact. He engineered a situation so vile that I couldn't stomach it to stay silent. Maybe bullying and threatening and slander works in AAA, but I hope indie developers realize how much power they have precisely because they have nothing to lose. We have direct access to players, the true source of our power and support. Most indie devs are afraid of being "blacklisted"... I ultimately decided I don't even want to work with any company or person who is primarily afraid of the truth of what they've done behind closed doors coming to light.
I guess the main thing left to do is to pay developers any outstanding money owed, and to release developers from contracts they would otherwise be bound to against their will, should they so choose.
This is fairly unlikely to happen without the company going bankrupt. If Dangen is continuing operations, there's a 100% chance Ben Judd has not pulled his initial investment out of the company and that Ben has remained as the primary investor and beneficiary of Dangen Entertainment's profits. Continuing to support Dangen Entertainment, even if Dan Stern makes good on their business obligations to their developers, is still supporting Ben Judd financially.
He told me he invested 300k of his own money. At the time just prior to DE's release, he claimed the company had just managed to become profitable due to Witch's House, with roughly 100k in extra profit. However, their basic operating costs were roughly 20k a month. Now that DDM has fired him, he will have to pay rent on that office, which was originally DDM's, so I will guess an additional 5k of rent will be added to their operating costs.
They bleed 300k a year just to keep the lights on and their own staff paid. What they took from DE was barely half a month's worth of expenses, which is why from their perspective it mattered so little to them.
They profited roughly 50k off of DE. I'm going to guess Minoria sold 30k units so far, roughly 400k minus Steam's cut. Disc Creatures, 20k. Bug Fables, 200k. BF had 25k expenses just for the Japanese localization. I'm not sure about the others, but let's not even bother calculating their full localization costs.
Dangen started with 400k this year, Ben's initial investment + 100k. They lost 265k this year from salary and localization expenses. They gained 620k from game sales, but roughly 70% of that is owed to the developers, so they only truly "have" 180k. They took 50k from DE.
So they're back at 365k. They very likely lost profit, and I haven't included full localization costs, devkit rentals, porting, buying Slack archives, legal/PR, any funding they've actually given up front to any developers. (They may also have more profits from other games, but typically most of a game's profits occur within the release year.)
If Ben takes out his investment and is truly no longer involved with the company, they maybe have 65k left. This is less than 3 months of operating costs.
Considering the character and business sense of the people involved, I assume Ben will keep his money in the company and they will slowly bleed to death hoping to strike it big with Switch releases in 2020. I don't know if the consumer base will realize that Ben Judd will ultimately still profit from Dangen sales.
The truly "sensible" business decision would be to lay off almost all staff (only Dan Stern, Dan Luffey, and Sal the porting specialist particularly pull their weight) and probably at this point rebrand under a different name hoping to god that will be enough to remove the taint associated with the "Dangen" name. But considering they are still keeping Nayan around, they are clearly prioritizing their mental image of a publishing company: good ol' boys drinking and having fun streaming awesome video games and sometimes talking about comic books and movies... rather than a profitable and sensible business model that prioritizes developer support and sound investment.
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Apologies I keep having so much to say. I know a lot of what I say may come off as empty conjecture, but I think the majority of the public and even many developers and publishers don't have a good grasp of the basic cashflow problems at hand here and wanted to provide what I believe to be sound information to the discussion.
