There are a few things that cause more stress and consternation for budding independent game developers. Finding the right publisher that supports them and the game from working prototype to finished product is hard enough if the developer isn’t business savvy. Along with that comes the pressures of marketing the product and making sure it gets the best kind of exposure. Should a developer be looking to branch out and have their game localized into different languages, that can create it’s own challenges.
A new studio based out of Osaka, Japan is attempting to bring all of these services together under one umbrella by the name of Dangen Entertainment, while tapping into decades of shared knowledge of the game development industry, from content acquisition, marketing, fundraising, publishing, localization and marketing.
Polygon got to sit down with two of the six-person team, Nayan Ramachandran and Dan Stern, at this year’s BitSummit event in Osaka to get a better idea of what to expect in the future for the new publisher and how it can help the little guys get a leg up in the world of indie development.
So let's get a round of introductions going shall we?
Nayan Ramachandran: Oh yeah, cool, cool, cool. My name is Nayan Ramachandran, I’m the “content connoisseur” of Dangen Entertainment. It actually says it on my card, but I’m one of the content acquisition guys at Dangen Entertainment.
Dan Stern: I’m Dan Stern, I’m the “Scholar of the First Deal.”
Polygon: Is that literally what it says on your card?
Ramachandran: It literally says it on his card!
Stern: But uh, essentially it’s all developer relations, one part lining up new projects and about nine parts just keeping things moving back and forth with developers.
Polygon: Good, so first off, let's start with the company. Why Dangen as a name?
Stern: That actually started off with Dan Luffey.
Ramachandran: Yeah, that started with him. So some of us are remote, we work through Skype calls and stuff for our weekly meetings and one of the things that we had to come up with was a company name because we were getting pretty close to announcing. So we were throwing around a bunch of dumb company names, trying to think of good ones. You think of good ones and they’re cheesy. You think of bad ones and they’re funny.
Stern: Whenever we thought of something that was good and not cheesy, it’d be already taken.
Ramachandran: And that happened a couple of times. We had a bunch of really good names that didn’t work out ...
So we were just throwing around bad names and stuff and Luffey threw out The Dandy Gentlemen. We all thought that was funny because we’re not gentlemen, we all wear hoodies and don’t shave, so clearly we’re not Dandy Gentlemen. But a few days later, we all thought, “What if we hire a woman later?” It’d be fine for just six guys right now, but it doesn’t make sense for a group that doesn’t have someone who’s not male in it. The name grew on us, but we later decided to do the Japanese thing of taking the first sound of a word and putting it together with another to make something else, just like how Monster Hunter is “Monhun.” When we put the two together, we immediately realized that dangen is actually already a word in Japanese that means “conviction,” and for us, that totally fits what we’re all about.
Polygon: So how did Dangen come together? What’s it all about?
Ramachandran: We are an indie-focused publisher that specializes in localization, pre- and post-release marketing, submission and publishing and we are all very experienced in publishing western games in Japan and Japanese games in the west. The possibility exists to do worldwide of course, not just say the U.S. and Japan and vice versa. If a developer needs help in literally every region, then we can absolutely provide.
Stern: Basically, Dangen Entertainment is an indie publisher, not only in the sense that we publish specifically indie games, but in the fact that we’re a small team with equal partnership and our fate is in our own hands. We are completely independent which is something I haven’t experienced in the past. I’ve never worked in a company where I have a stake in what my own future is. So yeah, Dangen Entertainment is an indie publisher. We’re only focusing on a bunch of titles that we really believe in. So something like four to six in a year and only working on dream projects, things we really care about, then throwing every resource we have at it, making sure that they get what they need to reach the audiences that will love them.
Polygon: What would would you say you provide that might stand out against other competitors?
Ramachandran: One of our biggest initiatives for Dangen is our connection with Twitch. We're connected with the Japanese global moderator for Twitch, allowing us to connect to more streamers, and make sure our devs get their games in front of more gamers.
Stern: I’ve always thought that this is what every publisher needs to ask themselves: “Why me? What am I doing and what am I providing to my partners to make this worthwhile?” So one of the interesting ways that we’re helping developers out is linking them up with famous AAA developers, particularly in the Japanese development scene to do things like collaborations. That could mean almost anything from a simple callout, like a quote about the game, to maybe getting them to play the game at an event.
Polygon: Yeah I actually noticed that you got Koji Igarashi the creator of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to play your games. And while it may add a level of publicity, it’s also giving those developers the opportunity to meet those figures that had inspired them so much.
Stern: Yeah, to meet those heroes and in some cases get direct feedback from them. But that’s not all we do. Say if a developer is inspired by the music of a game that they love very much, something that their own game took a lot of influence from; then we can link them in with that musician for example to do a track that will be featured on their own game. I think those tie-ins are great for the gamers too who are into those kinds of games for the exact same reasons. It’s fun for everybody.
Ramachandran: One other thing that we’d want to do for our developers is we want to do physical versions of some of our games. And some of these games would obviously not have box art already made because maybe they were released in the West only digitally or they never thought about doing a physical version of their game. Let’s say the developers are making a strategy RPG that’s really reminiscent of something like Fire Emblem. We would then be able to go and talk to one of the old character design artists for Fire Emblem to come in and do box art for the game. Because a lot of these games have pixel art characters, maybe even in the cutscenes, there’s still a lo-fi element to the characters where if you get the box art done by an artist, they can come up with a cool artists interpretation of what that character looks like for the box art.
Polygon: Now that you bring up creating physical copies and box art for the games, on thing I’d personally like to see, is a resurgence of game manuals.
Ramachandran: Manuals! Yeah I’m glad you said that!
Stern: Yeah seriously!
Ramachandran: Honestly one of my best memories is opening up the Diablo 1 and 2 boxes and reading through all of the lore that was in those manuals. Even in the PlayStation 2 era, game boxes still had great manuals! I love the idea of doing manuals. I adore manuals and specifically what I would like to do is separate the controls from the manual and save it for character information, backstory, item and weapon descriptions, that kind of thing. With the amount of data that goes into a AAA title these days, the longer you have to wait sometimes for the game to be ready when you put the disc in. What I’d normally love to do with the older titles is use that time installing to sit down and read that manual. With their absence now, that’s no longer an option anymore and I feel like that’s what people are missing.
Polygon: So with your support of indie developers, are you going to help all of them, even those more established, or just the newer ones?
Ramachandran: I think if you’re going to be working on indie games, you have to take a chance on new developers. I don’t think you’re really doing anybody a service by focusing entirely on established developers. The indie scene is all about new people coming in and trying their hand at making games. It’s supposed to be about the democratization of gaming, that’s the whole point right? So even if you’re a one-man team and this is your very first game, yeah, we’d love to see it! The fact is, you could have the next Downwell.
Polygon: So say this solo developer comes in...what kind of help would you provide if they’re struggling with many of the aspects of game development?
Stern: One of the things is, especially a solo developer, their most valuable resource is time. Everything needs their attention. The game’s design needs attention, the game's audio, its programming, the visuals need it. It’s a massive time investment. One of our games, Iconoclasts is a solo developed project and it took seven years! If you don’t have the support to cover things like testing or sourcing finances to keep the project running, it’s just going to drag development out further. Perhaps the worst situation is, if the game takes so long but you cross the finish line, when it comes to selling it, people don’t find it. It just doesn’t reach the audience that it was supposed to then has to compete with thousands of other great games. So definitely enabling them to have the time they need but shouldering some of the other work.
Polygon: So last but not least, what advice would you give an inexperienced first-time developer when they feel they’re ready to approach a publisher?
Ramachandran: Well our website actually has a “How to pitch a game to us” page, and it’s actually a pretty much the longest whole page on the website. I spent a lot of time writing the whole thing. Because of the experience that we have had, having games pitched to us, we understand what developers don’t realize we need. So we want to make sure that when they pitch a game to us, they’re putting their best foot forward. We want to make sure that they’re putting forward the best version of themselves as well as the best version of their game, so they can feel passionate about the work they’ve done and so the publisher can feel that too.
Polygon: So, in closing, is there anything else you guys would like to add?
Ramachandran: Well everyone should follow us at @dangen_ent on Twitter. That’s important. Oh! And follow us individually! I’m @thetrin, he’s @dnanoodle.
Stern: Yup! I’d also like to say, keep an eye out! We’ve had an incredibly strong launch. We’ve got four games we’ve already announced. So that’s Iconoclasts by Joachim Sandberg, Cross Code which is developed by Radical Fish Games, Brave Earth: Prologue by Kayinworks and Momodora V (working title) which is made by Bombservice. Those four titles are incredible, and each of them are different but there’s a certain type of thread tying them all together.
Ramachandran: There’s one thing I’d like to add actually, one thing I want to say, to the developers in fact. If you are releasing your game in like, Q3 2018, please don’t wait until Q2 of 2018 to start talking to publishers. It’s OK to talk in 2017 about a game you’re not releasing for a year or two. Because pre-release marketing is super important, help us collaborate with you so we can help and understand you during the development process is really, really important.
Stern: If you can find a good partner earlier on, that's more than they can do with you. I think everyone really benefits from that in the end.