Penny Blood director and Studio Wildrose CEO Matsuzo Machida has announced that he’s filed a lawsuit against production company Dangen Entertainment and its former CEO Ben Judd over “unpaid production costs”.
In an announcement spotted by news platform Automaton Media, Machida simply says that he’s suing Judd and Dangen, naming Judd as a “producer” on Penny Blood‘s Kickstarter and Dangen as part of the “campaign team”.
Presumably, Dangen and Judd were supposed to help Studio Wildrose and Machida out with production costs on Penny Blood, but Machida seems to be alleging that this didn’t happen. No further details about the lawsuit are provided in the announcement.
As a reminder, Penny Blood was one of two games that took part in a dual Kickstarter campaign back in 2022, with the other being Wild Arms spiritual successor Armed Fantasia.
The campaign, which was launched by Wild Arms creator Akifumi Kaneko and Shadow Hearts lead Matsuzo Machida, aimed to get both games funded simultaneously, since the developers believed that it would be more difficult to fund them separately.
Penny Blood and Armed Fantasia‘s dual Kickstarter asked for around $700,000 to bring both games to PC, and that goal was met within hours, with the campaign going on to make over $2.6 million in total.
Despite this success, we still don’t have release dates or specific release windows for either project. Notably, Kaneko and Armed Fantasia don’t seem to have anything to do with the lawsuit brought against Dangen and Judd by Machida.
If you feel like you recognize Ben Judd and Dangen’s name from somewhere, it may well be from accusations leveled against Judd and Dangen back in 2019, with Judd being accused of sexual misconduct and Dangen being accused of preying on indie studios.
Those allegations led to Judd being dismissed from his position with publishing firm Digital Development Management, as well as leading to his resignation from Japanese gaming festival BitSummit’s board of directors.
All of this is to say that Machida’s lawsuit isn’t the first time Judd and Dangen have been accused of foul play when it comes to indie developers. We’ll have to wait and see what, if anything, the lawsuit yields.