- The story you are about to hear should have already ricocheted across the games industry this year and cemented itself as one of the very worst scandals in its history. And I think that's exactly what would've happened had the people involved lived and worked in California, or in Paris, or in Tokyo, rather than in Jakarta. Instead, outside of Southeast Asia, it's like nothing has even happened. Today, we're gonna try and do our best to remedy that, but first I need to provide you with this significant list of content warnings and just say to you that
the stories you're gonna hear today are at times really unpleasant, but the reason we're sharing them is because the people involved want as many of you to see and hear what they went through as possible. In early September, I was sent video footage of an Indonesian game artist called Christa Sydney slapping herself across the face 100 times. With her permission, I'm gonna play a very short section of that video here and I obviously need to warn you that it's distressing to watch. (Christa slapping herself) Now the reason I was sent that footage was because back
in 2021 I'd actually spoken to Christa Sydney about her job and her relationship with her employers, for a story I was working on about outsourced labour in the video games industry. She told me back then that everything was going really great, which was surprising to me because it didn't exactly line up with what I'd heard from many of her coworkers who felt exhausted and overworked. But what I didn't know until now is that Christa had been suffering in a way I could not have even imagined at the time. Because that video you just watched a
very short clip from Christa claims to have recorded that and then sent it to her boss as a punishment for not having performed well enough at work. And as extreme as that video is, it's really just the razor sharp tip of a much larger iceberg in which Christa and some of her colleagues were subjected to years of abuse at the hands of an employer who was able to control and manipulate almost every aspect of their lives - For the whole week, like I wasn't allowed to sleep. - For me at the time it was like
scary, lonely. - She wanted me to take a picture of like the blood in my mouth. - She was like, "Don't look at her, you have to be strong. Don't show your empathy towards her." It was really scary. - The wooden frame of the door, like I had to like hit my head like as hard as possible. I had like concussion-like symptoms. - But before we can begin to understand all of that, let me very quickly get you up to speed with that first story I reported that had led me to speaking to Christa four
years ago. So back in 2021, People Make Games published a video titled How Game Publishers Buy Crunch Overseas. We'd wanted to investigate a part of game development that typically gets very, very little attention from the media, and so we told the story of two game studios which most of our audience had never heard of before, despite their contributions to games like The Last of Us, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Gears of War 4, and Warcraft 3: Reforged. And that's because these two companies, Lemon Sky Studios based in Malaysia and Brandoville Studios based in Indonesia are what people
in the business of making games call external developers or maybe outsourcers. This means they get hired by clients like Naughty Dog or The Coalition or whoever it may be to create, in this case, art assets that will be then used for their games. It costs an awful lot less to hire a game artist in Kuala Lumpur than it does in say Vancouver. And as a result, outsourcing to lower income countries has played a huge, huge role in how games are actually made. But as our reporting uncovered, the potential for exploitation here is significant. We found
that employees at each of these companies were routinely expected to work long stretches of unpaid overtime at the expense of their health. We're talking weeks straight, sometimes months of artists sleeping in the office, working weekends and late into the night in order to meet deadlines which simply could not be met otherwise. Here's my closing line from that video back in 2021. And at some point, if that keeps on happening, then crunch culture is no longer an unfortunate side effect of the business, it is in fact the product that's being purchased. So yeah, we published our
investigation and well not much changed really. Publicly, at least, I think the most consequential thing I saw happen in its aftermath was a panel at an event called the External Developers Summit, which had been put together in direct response to our reporting. It was called Let's Talk About Crunch. And in fact, one of the bosses of the two studios, Ken Lai of Brandoville, was actually invited to take part, which was great, although do you know who wasn't invited? Literally anybody who could speak to the actual experiences of the actual workers doing the actual crunch that
we'd just uncovered. All they really seem able to do is ask someone like Ken Lai is there much crunch happening at your company? And he's like, no, no, no, there's not. - I don't agree that developers sell the crunch to Southeast Asia. Instead, the developer is the key to bring the great value to these two countries. - And nobody challenges him on this despite our reporting having shone the spotlight on employees who said they spent months working at that office until 3:00 AM in the morning, or one put it quite bluntly that, and I quote,
"You are not treated as human." For the next three years, both Lemon Sky and Brandoville Studios continued on and the games industry continued to rely on their services in order to ship its games without, as far as I can tell, any meaningful push to improve the working conditions of the artists doing that work. This was until just a few months ago when news broke that Brandoville had shut down and that moment would prove to be the catalyst for its former employees to rush forward and share the true horror of what had been going on behind
its doors. And at the very centre of these allegations was Christa Sydney and her story. (dramatic music) - So I joined a company in February, 2019. I applied as a concept artist but didn't pass the portfolio at the time. - Christa was instead offered a marketing position, which she accepted, but things got off to a rocky start after she'd raised her voice to the company's CEO Ken Lai during a disagreement over how some business cards had been printed, and given she was still on probation at the time, she presumed this incident would now see her
let go from the company. But it wasn't actually Ken Lai who would make that decision. It was his wife, Cherry Lai, who ran the day-to-day operations at Brandoville and ultimately that decision would be up to her. - Just as she was about to announce that I was going to be kicked out, she said that God talked to her and so like she said, she's going to take me under her wing and give me like two weeks to prove myself. - Christa describes this new relationship between herself and Cherry as something resembling a mentorship, at least
to begin with anyway. - If anything, because I was like in such a vulnerable position, I was like very grateful that, oh, like I received a second chance. - But she said this dynamic began to shift in early 2020 as Jakarta entered lockdown during the COVID pandemic, and as Christa and several of her coworkers moved into the studio itself to live there full time. It's worth quickly understanding just a little about the building where all of this is happening. Brandoville Studios was based here in Central Jakarta with most staff working either on the first or
the second floor of these offices. Then on the ground floor you've got a lobby and reception area, as you might expect, but also a set of dorm rooms which house a select few employees who've been invited to not just work here but live here as well. And they're not the only ones because three floors above them is a bedroom belonging to Ken and Cherry Lai. Several of the employees who lived here during that period have told me that Cherry Lai developed a strict schedule for the way in which they were meant to use their time
each day. - 5:30 AM, we need to wake up and then like pray to God and then like 6:00 AM we need to like go do our exercise and then 8:00 AM shower, 9:00 AM be at the office, and then even like what time we need to drink water, like she also like put it like in the schedule and then what time we... we eat, what time we go to bed, so that kind of thing. - That schedule also included a weekly prayer meeting which employees told me was considered mandatory. It was also a Christian
prayer meeting because Cherry Lai is Christian, but her employees weren't, not necessarily. In fact the vast majority of Indonesians identify as Muslim and these particular employees practised a range of different religions at the time, but the mandatory prayer meeting they needed to attend was always Christian. Cherry's relationship with certain staff members during this period also became increasingly personal. - Slowly, Cherry started to like divide us. - When Christa first moved to the studio, she shared her dorm room with another employee called Ilenda, and the two of them had actually been close ever since their college
days together. This was until, according to Christa and other employees I've spoken to, Cherry took an active interest in their relationship. - She started to gossip about Ilenda to me, started to like try to get me to be suspicious of her. She told me that, oh like you and I, we're the same, like we're like popular girls and then like Ilenda is like more of a nerdy girl, but like before that like we never had like any problem with each other. - Several former employees told me that they believe Cherry intentionally meddled in the personal
relationships of her staff and that this was especially true for women. - She has like this Excel sheet, like the list of the people she considers her friends in her life and number one was me. So, yeah, it made me like, felt special at the time. - These one-on-one conversations however would then feel extremely at odds with the way in which Cherry would criticise and discipline Christa and other employees during the workday. - [Anonymous] Let's say if I make a mistake and then she will scold me publicly. Sometimes if she really feels angry or whatever,
she will just call names. Maybe like "stupid," "you piece of ****," "you *****." Yeah, all those kind of words. And then privately she will say something like, "You know, I spoke to you publicly so people don't attack you but actually you are fine." - When the former Brandoville employees came forwards with their stories in early September, they came with receipts. Some of these have been shared publicly online already on social media, while others have been sent to People Make Games as part of our own investigation. And as a result of that, I've now read through
hundreds of messages which employees say Cherry sent to them either privately or in group chats with other staff members and these messages show her regularly threatening to fire her employees for the smallest perceived mistakes or using language that is just totally demeaning and inappropriate. These messages paint a picture of an easily irritated and usually erratic leader who expects and often receives complete subservience from her employees who she in turn then micromanages to an extreme. Despite Christa often receiving the very worst of this attention, she and a few other employees were at the same time ostracised
by the rest of the company because they were seen as being utterly devoted to Cherry. - [Anonymous] All of us know that Christa is struggling. One of my friends mentioned that Christa cried several times after being scolded like this, but she still become Cherry's loyalist. She and some of the others had been brainwashed by Cherry. - They did not like me at all. If they do something wrong, I probably tell it directly to Cherry. I didn't really have much friends at that time, because like most of people hate me. - This isolation was also extended
to their families as well. - Yeah, so she's always like convinced me and other people actually that, you know, family and friends, they're just like your burden, like if you wanna succeed, like you have to basically like set them aside. - For me, at the time it was like scary, lonely. I didn't have someone to talk to. I didn't feel like I don't have any friends and I cannot trust anyone even like probably my family. - I mentioned earlier that as part of our reporting on crunch conditions at Brandoville, I'd first contacted Christa back in
2021 where she told me and I quote, "I know some people say this place is tough to work at, and I agree, it's a very disciplined company which is why I think it's great because as an artist we tend to let bad habits like slacking off get the better of us. I love the fact that they accepted us no matter where we're from and who we are. So I'm happy to say it's also a very woman friendly environment." Christa has since told me that in fact this whole email exchange that we had had been dictated
to her by Cherry Lai, but perhaps the more surprising revelation for me anyway was that in the aftermath of our video having been published, Christa actually recorded her own video in defence of Brandoville Studios, which was then shared with organisations like the External Developer Summit who she told me was threatening to blacklist Brandoville from the event going forwards because of what our reporting had uncovered. And in this video, Christa is visibly overcome with emotion about how much Brandoville means to her and how thankful she is to both Ken and Cherry Lai. - Even my family,
they know how life changing it has been for me to work here. They saw me like, you know, my mom has seen me change. It really touches me when I saw like how much my mom supports me working here. It's something that is very special for me. - This video was later shown to other employees at Brandoville, some of whom remember feeling extremely uncomfortable as they watched it. - Even at that time where Cherry show us that video, Christa is really proud and was tearing up too because she was like, "Yeah, I'm doing that gladly,
Mrs. Cherry," something like that, and then we're like, okay girl, you need help, you need help but you don't know. - We asked a representative from XDS if they remember receiving this video and here's a response I got from its executive director. "I do remember seeing that video but I don't believe it was sent to XDS directly. I think a colleague shared it with me at the time and yes, I think you're right that we didn't know what was truly happening at Brandonville, which may have been the reason we gave Ken Lai a platform to
address the issues of crunch. I'm sorry to hear the situation has worsened and I do think it's a good thing that you're shedding light in order to mitigate this from happening at other studios." The situation has worsened is one way to put it. I think it's worth reminding ourselves here that this was an outsourcing company for the video games industry because I think as we need to delve into some of the more coercive and violent behaviour happening behind closed doors, it might be easy to lose sight of that. But to be clear, Brandoville Studios, since
we last reported on its crunch in 2021, has contributed to games like Age of Empires 4 as well as a now cancelled sci-fi project from Deviation Games before it shut down earlier this year, and even Ubisoft's upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows. Christa recalls a turning point being the next External Developer Summit that took place that year in Canada and that she would be attending in person along with Ken, Cherry, and several colleagues - And she told me to like keep being awake. I wasn't allowed to sleep, so like for the whole week, like I wasn't allowed
to sleep, I had to like work with her. She was like really micromanaging everything. I had to like work while I had like Google Meet on and then like shared my screen so she can monitor if I'm like asleep or not. - Christa told me that Cherry seemed to require very little sleep herself and sometimes she would expect the same from her employees but this was on a whole different level. She also clarified that when she's talking about a week there, she actually means a four day stretch building up to the flight over to Canada
and I asked her during those four days how much in total she thinks she slept. - Probably like a couple of minutes. I took like some like five minute breaks to the toilet. I think like the first time I finally slept was on the plane. - [Chris] And at the event itself there was a problem. - So we took a group picture like at XDS to send to Cherry because like her legs were so swollen from not sleeping that she couldn't attend the event. It just so happened that I was standing in the middle of
the picture and then Ken Lai was standing like in the corner and she got really mad. She told me that, "Oh, you stood in the middle of the picture when it's supposed to be the CEO," like basically I was bringing harm and danger to Ken Lai as the CEO. So I got in really big trouble because of that. She told me to write some sentences like a hundred times and then submit to her as proof. - Here's Christa reading those same sentences back today. - [Christa] I am Christa Sydney. I am very sorry because I
am not humble and I am lying. I gave excuses. I suck because I used lazy as excuse today. The truth is I am greedy, selfish, and I think dirty and nasty. - Christa has also shared WhatsApp messages with People Make Games from this trip which appear to show Cherry dictating who Christa is allowed to talk to, including whether she's allowed to speak to someone delivering takeout or to the cashier at a 7/11. Other messages see Cherry writing a long, rambling screed about how Christa needs to accept God into her life, comments about Christa's parents and
their marital problems, and finally a demand that Christa should fear her and fear God in order to succeed. In the following days, Christa claims to have tried to resign from Brandoville studios, although she says that Cherry would not allow this to happen. - I had a phone call with her late at night. I told her that I wanted to resign because I really couldn't handle it anymore. I felt like I was being a burden because everything I did led to her being angry, so I really felt useless, felt like I'm being a burden to basically
like everyone. Then she said that I'm not allowed to resign because I had a lot of debt to her. - According to Christa, Cherry had explained that this debt had been accrued over the course of her time at Brandoville, during moments in which Cherry had brought her along to expensive meals, purchased her gifts, or invited her to staycations during the pandemic. - And also like the hours that she spent talking to us, even though it's basically nonsense but she said, it's basically like educating us. So she said that she's invested like all of this for
years at that point, like three years going on. She said I still have to repay my debt so I wasn't allowed to resign. - After returning from this trip, the abuse Christa would receive reached a totally new extreme. - Imagine like this is Cherry and here is Christa. She'll told Christa like, "Oh, you ugly fat pig, step back." So she have to move back and hide herself because Cherry doesn't wanna see Christa. And then after that she was like, "Move again, move again." So she started like "Okay, okay," and then keep, and then even though
she was treated that way, Christa still has to put smile on her face. - [Anonymous] Cherry said that if she asked Christa to eat a dead rat, Christa would do it, and I was like, "I'm sorry? A dead rat?" - She kept like commenting on my weight specifically like in front of everyone. She would say like, "Oh Christa is like ugly and fat. If she keeps being ugly and fat, she would get fired." - During a period in which Christa and two of the members of the marketing team were working from the front desks of
Brandoville Studios and another building elsewhere in the city, Christa's appearance was being heavily micromanaged by Cherry. In the next clip you're gonna hear Christa use the term QC, as in quality control, which is something you might usually expect to hear when describing feedback on, for example, marketing assets that you're working on and not the clothes you are wearing on your body. - We need to, every morning take a picture of our full body, like neck down, like show her our outfit that day and then she would like QC it. She would tell us like if
we look fat or our clothing is like professional or not, and then like she would comment like, my body needs more diet, that kind of thing. - It was also in this later period that Cherry's punishments for Christa became more and more physical. While Christa has told me that much of this happened privately, some did also take place in public. For example, one meeting in early 2023 saw Christa being humiliated as some kind of lesson for the few other Brandoville employees in attendance. - She told Christa to kneel down, her arms straight up. She told
us like, "Don't look at her. You have to be strong, don't show your empathy towards her." Something like that. It was really scary. How can I not feel sorry if I see someone treated that way? - She doesn't know the word kneel so every time she would say like "Bow down," and then I would like bow but then she'd get angry because I didn't understand what she was saying and then I had to kneel. She told a couple of people to go inside the room and see me kneeling for hours. - In private, things were
getting much worse. Christa said that to begin with, Cherry would ask her to slap her own face lightly like this in order to wake herself up if she looked lethargic or if she made a small mistake, but soon this would no longer be enough, and she would ask her to do it harder and harder. - The earliest record that I have was like a recording of me hitting myself in the mouth until it bled and then she wanted me to take a picture of the blood in my mouth. - The most extreme version of this
you've already seen some of. It's the video in which Christa hits herself as hard as she can across her face 100 times. Now I've seen that full video, I've counted each slap as it lands, and the thing that has stuck with me the most, other than the sheer violence of it, is the expression on Christa's face throughout. It's the same Christa that I've spoken to but also it's not, it's like she's on autopilot, like she's not really even there. Christa claims that in most cases she was asked to slap herself in private or over a
video call, but in this case because it was a recording that she then needed to send to Cherry, we actually have a screenshot of the chat log when that footage was sent. It reads, "Hi Mrs. Cherry noted will do. I would like to report that I have slapped myself 100 times and on my way to Brandoville Studios. Thank you." Cherry replies, "I don't believe, how to prove?" Three minutes later Christa sends the video to Cherry who then replies, "Did I ask you send me? You can't directly without asked. Impolite." Impolite, that's the word she chooses
to use in this moment having just presumably watched her employee do that to herself. I can't get over the coldness of that. The slightly disinterested, irritated, callousness of it. Impolite? I asked Christa how many other people at Brandoville Studios at the time knew that this was happening to her. - So throughout like 2023 I believe like no one else knew because it happened, either I was already like in my rented place and then she called me and then she told me to slap myself or it happens when I'm meeting her late at night at the
office, just like the two of us. - Christa told me that she believes Ken Lai, Cherry's partner and the CEO of the company, was also unaware of this physical side of the abuse. She said when it came to the rest that he saw some of it happen and seemed to feel uncomfortable about it, but most of the time these things would happen when he just wasn't in the room. There's also another video, this time recorded by Cherry Lai herself, in which she's berating a visibly confused and dazed looking Christa outside a room on the third
floor of Brandoville Studios. I'm gonna play a bit of that video for you now, we're gonna include some subtitles that we've written, and then Christa is going to explain in her own words what she claims has just happened to her. - I'm very sorry, Mrs. Cherry. (pensive music) - [Cherry] You lie and say sorry to me, for what? You lie, then you need to tell the truth. What is the truth? - The truth... - [Cherry] What's the truth? - The truth. She told me to hit my head against the wall so it was like the
wooden frame of the door. Like I had to hit my head as hard as possible. I thought like she was joking right? But no, she apparently she wanted me to hit as hard as possible until I had concussion-like symptoms and in that video when she was berating me, I was already delirious because of the impact and then I had, my vision became all white for like a couple seconds and then my ears rang and then I had a migraine and basically I was like, really out of it and then she tried to like gaslight me
into thinking that I was a liar because I didn't remember because well, I just hit my head. - We also need to take a moment to talk about financial abuse here because there are at least two examples of which we've been told about. We're gonna start with one of Christa's coworkers first, Caesar. He told us that each month, he sent a large portion of his salary to Cherry Lai in order for her to help him control his spending habits. - Like she knows I like to buy stuff and my money management wasn't good so I
was like okay, like I trust her. - Caesar told me that he was left with just enough to cover his essential needs each month, but if he then wanted to make an additional purchase, something that was considered a luxury, he would then need to ask Cherry's permission as to whether or not he could do that and it was up to her to decide whether or not that purchase should be made. I asked Caesar how often Cherry would say yes in these moments compared to no. - Yeah, mostly no. From that moment like I didn't buy
anything much, basically. - What makes this dynamic potentially even worse is that according to Caesar, he doesn't actually know how much money he will have sent to Cherry in total as part of this arrangement because in his words it was Cherry who managed all of these finances and had the spreadsheets and looked after those numbers. And when he left Brandoville a few years later I asked him, well what happened to those funds? - She didn't give me back, so I think she stole it or something like this but she didn't give me back. - Caesar
told me that if he were to hazard a guess, he likely gave Cherry somewhere in the region of 5 million Indonesian rupiah as part of this arrangement. That works out at just over a month's full pay. On top of this, when it seemed like Caesar was going to resign from the company in 2021, he claims that Cherry told him in fact he owed the company over 200 million Indonesian rupiah, several multiples of his total annual salary. As you can see in this invoice that he provided us with, part of this is due to a Unity
certification test that he'd taken and then this gigantic chunk at the top here was for a training programme he claims to have not even started yet, which would've seen him become an instructor at the yet to be built Brandoville Academy, a school for new artists in Indonesia, headed up by Ken Lai. Caesar was eventually fired from Brandoville Studios a few months later but not before he claims to have paid back 7 million Indonesian rupiah, leaving just 20% of his paycheck intact each month. Christa's personal finances were also tangled up with Cherry's own as well. In
the final months of Brandoville Studios, before it would declare bankruptcy, Christa was, on paper at least, being paid a decent salary. - Basically she told the finance that my salary was 18.5 million but then she told me that that was actually her money and she's basically kind of like putting it temporarily in my account. So I was not in the right state of mind to think that that is anything suspicious because she didn't give me like space to think, because first of all, severe sleep deprivation. Second of all like she sent me a message almost
every hour so I didn't have time to think of anything else rather than like respond or like work. - Christa has shared WhatsApp messages with People Make Games dating from April to June of 2024 in which she can be seen informing Cherry on multiple occasions how much she's received that month from her salary, and then Cherry appears to dictate what she then needs to do with it. - So each month I was only supposed to keep like 1.5 million and then like the rest like 17 million I need to withdraw, exchange to Hong Kong dollars,
and then like pass it to her or I have to buy her stuff, like a lot of like expensive clothes and like expensive items. - Doesn't sound great, does it? Sounds a bit fraudy actually, but hey, if you are wondering what Cherry makes of these allegations, what her response to that might be, as well as everything else in this video, we have actually had a small amount of communication with her, and it was weird, and I'm gonna tell you about that later on in this video. But needless to say she did not respond to this
specific allegation. Now there's one more story I wanna tell you about before we get to how all of this came to an end. It's from a woman that you've not heard from yet. Her name is she Syifana Afiati, or Syifa for short, and she was for a time the business development manager at Brandoville Studios. While working at Brandoville in late 2022, Syifa became pregnant with her second child and this pregnancy she told me was really difficult to manage alongside her work life, which was extremely taxing, but also specifically because of the actions of Cherry Lai.
- She didn't care if we are pregnant. If she asked us to go for a meeting with her after working hours, we need to attend. And again, when I was pregnant, sometimes I had a meeting with her until 1:00 AM in the morning and until 3:00 AM in the morning. It was quite intense. - In early 2023, while in her second trimester, Syifa began to haemorrhage. She was rushed to hospital where she was informed by the medical team there that she needed to stay at the hospital and get as much bedrest as possible. At the
same time, Syifa tells me there was an issue involving a project that she'd be managing at work and while in hospital she was contacted by Brandoville employees first asking her to come into the office for a meeting and then later asking if she could work remotely from a hospital bed, answering emails and responding to clients. She declined both options and eventually even asked to resign from the company altogether in order to just focus on her own health and the health of her unborn child. - At the time, Cherry Lai was the one who contacted me.
She said that she was really mad because I'm resigning and she even blamed my husband, "Is it your husband again? You abandon your future, your dream job because of your husband again?" She said, "Okay, just take a leave but you cannot resign." - Two weeks later, Syifa gave birth to her second child, a little boy called Arslan. He was born more than two months prematurely and was immediately transferred to a neonatal intensive care unit. Over the coming weeks, Syifa would visit Arslan there each morning with the hospital being relatively close to the Brandoville offices. -
Sometimes, if I have time after I visit my son, I come to Brandoville to chit-chat with Brandoville colleagues just to have someone to talk with and Cherry Lai noticed about that, that I already chit-chat with my friends and she asked me if I can start to work. You know, in Indonesia, the maternity leave is three months? It was only one month after I gave birth. - Syifa agreed to do this, although on two conditions, the first of which was that she could visit her son still in hospital and the second was that her workload would
need to be much more manageable given the intense pressure she was now under. Syifa claims this did not end up being the case and her work life remained very stressful and she recalls visiting her son in intensive care unit and needing to step out of the room on multiple occasions to take calls about work at Brandoville from Cherry Lai. Four months after being born and still in intensive care, Arslan unfortunately died. - I remember my son passed away on September 28th, 2023. At that time I also had like quite important meeting with a client at
7:00 AM and he passed away like 11:00 PM before the meeting and I think my mind was very get into the overworking. The first person I was, I texted at the time was my working groups, not my parents, but my working groups because the next day I will have like quite an important presentation. I told them, can you guys back up me? Cover me for the presentation? Because I need to attend my son's funeral, I need to taking care of that. - Syifa then took a few days of emergency leave from work, although it turned
out she didn't go through the exact correct process in order to do this, a process that should have involved her asking Cherry Lai directly for permission. People Make Games has been provided with a screenshot of a message that Cherry Lai then sent to Brandoville's HR manager at the time, a woman called Alicia Sandra, and in this message you can see her discussing what is happening with Syifa and what needs to be done next. I want to remind you here before I start reading it that this message was sent just three days after Arslan had passed
away. "Of course I understand her loved one passed away, but basic communication can't be avoided and no way of any happened can have any exceptional to we need to do anyone a favourite." Sorry, it's written like this. You can sort of guess what she means. "So just mark down in our records and starting now counted her as in leave. No way we pay for her currently sad mood or anything. This is so funny. I also have my dad passed away or any kind of thing happened won't make things not function. This is really not normal
to me. Anyways, I'm just saying to me she's like a Natalia," that's referencing another employee at Brandoville who has children, "And is that every woman will become one? So scary." Syifa had at that time taken three days off of work in order to grieve the death of her son and would return to work full-time the following week. Yeah, I don't know what else to say about that. Syifa, a few months later resigned, and would move with her family to Australia. Yeah. On August 8th, 2024, Brandoville Studios entered liquidation and was shut down. While most of
its former employees waited for their severance to arrive and looked for work and opportunities elsewhere, a handful were convinced by Ken and Cherry to help them try and set up a new outsourcing company called LaiLai Studios. Christa is keen for me to point out here that she didn't design the logo, which for some reason resembles a toilet. The group spent a few weeks holed up at the St. Regis Hotel in Jakarta where they would try to figure out how to pivot to this new company and how also to attract investment. These would be the last
weeks that Christa would spend with Cherry Lai, and they would also be some of the most violent. Christa recalls one moment in which she and another woman, Alicia, the former HR manager you just heard about, the two of them were approaching the hotel room of Cherry Lai. - So she opened her hotel room. I stood in front of it. She slapped, like she hit my head until my glasses fell off. She stomped on my glasses until it broke and then she slapped me a couple of times, like she pushed me against the wall, and then
she poured water on me and then told me to clean up the mess. - This incident has been corroborated to People Make Games by Alicia Sandra, and she also confirms what Christa believes to be the reason for this attack, which is that the two of them had left supplies for Ken and Cherry next to their hotel room door rather than hung on the door handle of the room itself. Two days prior to this, Christa, Cherry, and several other colleagues attended a meeting at the KYK building in Jakarta where upon arrival and after realising that a
document hadn't been printed off, which Cherry had requested, Cherry slapped Christa several times, punched her in the chest, grabbed her around the throat, and then kicked her before leaving for the meeting that was happening upstairs. The following month, with Brandoville Studios now having officially closed for good and those few people still orbiting Ken and Cherry having now drifted away even more so, Christa tells me that it was once again at the St. Regis Hotel, this time she's waiting for Cherry late at night, that she finally realises this woman's power over her is no longer real.
- So St. Regis is like really cold, like inside the hotel, it's like so cold. It felt like it was winter over there, and I had been standing by since morning until like nighttime. So it was like, I was so cold, she didn't let me eat until it was late at night, and she didn't let me properly cover myself up with like a blanket. So she was taunting me. She was like challenging me basically. I thought to myself like she already doesn't have anyone else. Like I was quite literally the only person left with her
and she's still doing this to me. - Christa claims that Cherry had sent her out with her ATM cards in order to check the account balances ahead of the next day, and upon her arrival back at the hotel where she was expecting to meet Cherry, she found that Cherry had in fact returned to her hotel room. Now Christa knew the drill at this point. She would usually be expected to either message Cherry, call her, maybe knock on her hotel room door. She would not be able to leave without Cherry's permission. - But this time around
like I was like, you know what? I'm so tired, it's like 2:00 AM. I should order like a cab home. And then when she realised that I wasn't going back to her, she panicked. - She tells me there were messages, phone calls, and threats, but she didn't go back. Instead, with the help of her mum and her brother, Christa began the work of compiling evidence to show what had happened to her and her colleagues over the last few years. Because here's the thing about bombarding someone with abuse over the course of years, and in Christa's
own words, almost every hour. When this time comes, those messages exist and Christa and her colleagues are gonna have just so many receipts to work with. Indonesians have a phrase that's popular right now as trust in the country's police force and justice system are especially low. It's just four short words and here they are. - "No viral, no justice." - [Chris] It means that if you want the authorities to take your story seriously and act upon it, if you want justice, you need that story to blow up on social media and force them to get
involved. And in Indonesia at least, that's exactly what happened with the Brandoville allegations. They went viral and in turn the Indonesian police has now begun interviewing witnesses, collecting evidence, and according to the Jakarta Globe, is looking to bring Cherry Lai in for questioning. Although that is going to prove difficult for them because I believe Cherry Lai is no longer in Indonesia. I think she's in Hong Kong. And the reason I think that is because, well she told me. I emailed Cherry in November about the allegations you've now heard in this video, offering her and Ken
the opportunity to answer the many questions we had to ask them. She replied and started off by thanking me for the reporting I'd done on the crunch conditions at her studio in 2021, which was unexpected, before going on to say, and I quote, "To me, my part of the story is not important, as long as my team are good and safe now. However, I will love to meet a new friend if you can make it to Hong Kong." I told Cherry that I'd be happy to travel to Hong Kong in order to speak to her,
but that any conversation we had would need to be both on the record and on camera, and at this point she seemingly changed her mind and shortly stopped replying to my emails. As for Ken Lai, well, he never replied to begin with or answered my calls and he remains a mystery to me, honestly, here. I'm not exactly sure how we're meant to feel about his role in all of this. The employees I've spoken to are somewhat split on his culpability. Some make the very persuasive argument that he is, as one source put it to me,
Cherry Lai's biggest enabler. As her husband and as the CEO of Brandoville Studios, he should have known what was going on, he should have done more to stop it, he should have protected the people that he was responsible for. That incident at the KYK building I mentioned just a few minutes ago in which we're told that Cherry slapped Christa several times, put her hand around her throat, hit her in the chest, and kicked her. Well, one of the witnesses who saw that happen told me that this took place in the building's lobby and when it
happened, Ken Lai was in that same lobby, elsewhere in the room, but in the same lobby and appeared to act as if nothing had happened. But what confuses things for me is that there are others, including Christa, who believe that Ken Lai may be another victim of Cherry's abuse and that his silence comes from a place of fear. I don't know if that's true. I just don't really know enough about Ken Lai altogether, and when I mentioned that to a former Brandoville employee a few days ago on a call, they replied, nobody does. As for
Christa's future, I asked her what she intends to do next now that all of this has finally gone public. - Personally, I am hoping to recover mentally and physically. So I'm under some treatments at the moment and then hopefully I can get back on my feet. If things go well, planning to study law want to be able to help like other artists in the future, for them to have like a better working environment than I did. - Christa told me that Indonesia is in desperate need of improved labour laws, which can better protect its workforce
from exploitation across pretty much every level, and that she hopes to in some small way contribute to that change going forwards, which is just a remarkable place for her to have ended up after all that she's been through, so huge shout out to Christa there. Now, I do wanna end this video by also just talking about the reason Christa and some of her coworkers agreed to be interviewed by me again this time around because I really think that is the elephant in the room when it comes to this story. Now, this concept of "No viral,
no justice," is certainly part of it, but there's something else going on as well. The video games industry as we know it today would look completely, utterly different without outsourced labour. Seriously, if you pick almost any AAA game at random from your collection and properly read through its credits, you're gonna start to get some idea of the sheer scale at which this medium has relied on outsourcing for things like the creation of art assets, animation, audio work, localization, and QA. That's assuming the game you've picked has properly credited all of the people involved in its
creation, which is not exactly a given, but you get my point. However, these Brandoville employees want you, our audience, to hear about their story because outside of their home country, they're not being treated as this crucial linchpin of the video game making process. If they had been, you probably would've heard about these terrible things that have happened to them already, and the reason you haven't is because outsourcing, particularly when it comes to lower income countries, is a topic that people living in the global north don't feel very comfortable talking about. And that discomfort has led
to, in my opinion, one of the very worst abuses of power I've ever come across in this industry being largely missed or perhaps even ignored by people who don't live in Indonesia. It's barely being covered in the press, it's not being called out by the game studios who've relied on Brandoville's work up until now, and it has started no wider conversation outside of Southeast Asia about the working conditions of outsourced labour in the video games industry. Why is that, do you think? What makes Christa Sydney and her coworkers any less important than game developers based
elsewhere in the world? There's likely many answers to that question, but none of them are good. If this video does end up reaching a wider audience and brings these stories to people living in the UK, in Europe, in the US, the global north, I hope it does prompt some conversation, some proper conversation on that front at least. I'd like to offer a huge heartfelt thank you to everyone who spoke to People Make Games for this piece. I think it requires a very special kind of courage to take these kinds of experiences public and be this
vulnerable about something so awful, and I hope you feel that we did those experiences justice. If you're watching this video and feel that this kind of games journalism is important to you and that we're offering something you are not getting enough of elsewhere, then please do consider supporting our work over at patreon.com/peoplemakegames. There's just no way we could have taken a swing at an investigation like this without the direct backing of our audience. We've been working on this one since September, and it's required just so much time in terms of tracking down the right people
to interview, sorting through a mountain of screenshots and evidence, and corroborating the stories that you've now heard in order to be able to publish them today. To be pretty blunt with you here, we make very, very little money from YouTube advertisements, certainly not enough to run a channel like this. We've not sold a portion of this video to a sponsor. It would not have felt right in this context, I don't think. Certainly. And yeah, we are not beholden to or supported by a giant corporation either. It is just us. We're a small team that try
to tackle big stories and we get to do that because of you. So yeah, final plug. If you wanna help us take on more investigative work like this in the future, head over to patreon.com/peoplemakegames. That's it, thank you so much for watching. I know it's a long video, I know it's a hard topic, but I really do think there's value in a lot more people knowing about this. So yeah, thank you for watching and we'll see you next time. (dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues)
