Indie game development studio Persona Theory Games is being alleged of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct.
A tweet by JLicious brought this issue to light, as a response to Persona Theory Games co-founder Saqina Latif being recently inducted into the The Game Awards 2023 Future Class.
The tweet indirectly points to a Reddit thread (which is still live) where an intern for Persona Theory Games accused of an employee sexually harassed them and other employees at the company.
Despite not meeting the person face-to-face (the studio employees do work remotely), the intern reported that “there was harassment, threatening messages on Discord at 2AM, and pointlessly long meetings where nothing gets done because one male lead wanted things done his and his way only despite constantly asking us for feedback and contributions.”
The intern said all these misconducts have been “reported to the head of the company of who was a woman (and didn’t do anything”. The woman being reference here is Saqina, who holds the managing director title at Persona Theory.
That tweet has since sparked more victims, as well as people who have heard stories directly from the victims, to come forward and share more of the work culture at the studio.
One of these comes from an anonymous direct message received by 7th Beat Games’ Hafiz Azman. The anonymous DM namedropped the perpetrator as “Buddy”, and they have set up a rule where interns at Persona Theory are all called “Nameless” “until they are proven worthy to get their names back.”
The rest of the DM goes how Buddy can go back-and-forth of verballing abusing their workers to being sorry and nice and encouraging the staff to do their best.
A separate tweet thread by @karmsdesu revealed the extent of the sexual harassment that the development studio has went through. And it’s enough to warrant a trigger warning. Those are vile things that a person high up in the chain command should be allowed to do, and things that the boss shouldn’t do nothing about.
This “Buddy” is assumed to be fellow Persona Theory Games co-founder Buddy Anwardi. According to Kakuchopurei, Buddy has since resigned from the company.
Persona Theory Games has yet to issue an official response to these allegations.
The broader Malaysian game dev community, however, has issued a response to stand with the victims or are distancing away from Persona Theory for the time being.
This includes OutCrowd, Kaigan Games (they worked with Persona Theory founders in 2016 for the hit game Sara Is Missing) William of Twilight Foundry (who worked at Persona Theory from 2020-2021), Dale Bashir of IGN SEA and developer of DevaData (who worked at Persona Theory in 2017), and The MY SG Voice Actors Community.
Persona Theory Games released their visual novel game Kabaret earlier this year, which you can find our review here.