How a former Dow Jones investigator is bringing due diligence to games

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Hi everyone and welcome back to In the Hot Seat. Now today I've got a guest who's had a very interesting career path. She spent 5 years 5 plus years working as an investigative researcher at Dow Jones digging into some of the murkiest corners of global finance. She then decided to start her own due diligence firm for the games industry. Now Chelsea Anglin, founder of DD for Games, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you.
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I was so I'm so excited to chat to you today. I just mentioned a little bit of your career path and you're talking at PGC Summit Shanghai very very shortly. So Chelsea, my first question to you is you have this sort of really interesting career. Um, you spent over 5 years as I mentioned doing investigative research at Dow Jones before founding DD for Games. Now, what made you out of curiosity turn that lens specifically on the gaming industry?

Yeah, so I've always had a passion for the games industry ever since I started learning Chinese. I'm based in Taipei and I speak Chinese every day and the reason I started learning Chinese was so I could play Japanese video games actually in Japanese because they share character system. Anyway, that is to say my I've had a long time passion for games industry um and when I got to working at Dow Jones and doing due diligence research, I'd never heard of due diligence before I had gotten into the field and I thought to myself the games industry or any industry that deals with a lot of small businesses and partnerships could benefit from this lens. Um, so that's when I decided to found DD for Games and apply my current my previous research experience in due diligence to the games industry as a way to like pivot and also bring a new lens to the industry. Yeah, so those two fold.

And when you out of curiosity cuz as you were speaking, when you came into that when you sort of married the two, was that at a time when you were looking around and you were thinking, well, this is something that no one's really doing right now. I'm seeing a lack of due diligence within the gaming industry that I could sort of fill.
Yeah, it was 100% that.
[laughter]
What I know about the games industry and what I've seen now that I'm in working in the games industry is that a lot of partnerships are made quite casually. You can meet someone through a game jam or in a discord or at a conference or friend of a friend of a friend and you've heard they're pretty good from your friend and then you start working together, but you've never Many people don't really look into the backgrounds of the people they're working with outside of like a first page of Google or asking AI or looking at a LinkedIn page. So there's not a lot of depth or breadth to a partnership due diligence and that's really important in one doing global business, especially when working with US dollar.

Um, there's some laws about making sure you have done KYC or knowing your customer before you enter into an international partnership so you can make sure they're not sanctioned or they're not funding bribery. So there's a it's really important to do due diligence and I just realized when I did some research into the games industry that this is a space that could really benefit from people doing more in-depth background checks.
Interesting. So I'm really interested in this part of your story, too, Chelsea. So you're based in Taipei as you mentioned. You're doing your MA at NCCU while running a consulting practice. How much does being sort of a part of that world change what you're able to see that someone say in London or New York just wouldn't be able to?
Yes, being in Taipei is lovely for working in games. Um, Taiwan has a really uh a very strong indie scene here. So it's really great getting to learn more about Taiwan because people don't really consider Taiwan's games industry when they think about the greater Chinese language ecosystem of

games. Like I know I didn't before I moved here. Um so it's great getting that perspective on the games industry. It makes me think more seriously about Hong Kong as its own games market and also China. Um so being based here in Taipei is great for attending conferences and seeing on the grounds development the Chinese gaming language ecosystem. Also for when it comes to do diligence research, it's easier to get access to certain Chinese databases here um as opposed to in uh the states where I'm from.
We've talked a little a bit about due diligence. Um but for those who don't know maybe the intricacies of it, Chelsea, what is due diligence and what does it actually look like in the realm of games and how is it relevant?
Yeah, so I'll break it down. So a due diligence is basically like knowing who you're working with before you work with them. So in essence, it's like a fancy background check. For instance,

if you sign up for a credit card, they run a background check on your credit to just verify that you have like good enough history. It's the same thing with due diligence when it comes to uh global partnerships. So someone will make sure that you exist, that you are who you say you are, that you do or don't have reputational risk that could impact the partner that's signing the contract before they work with you. Um so those are some considerations in due diligence, especially when you're having like a legal uh contract being signed or any type of sponsorship. Those are types of situations where I've done due diligence. So that's just like the overall basic um definition of due diligence. And so in the games industry, when I'm working with uh investors or publishers, I'll doing a background check on a studio or a developer before they decide to sign like a really big contract deal with them, that's the kind of thing I'm looking into. I'm looking into does the

studio exist? Or if they're an indie dev, like do they have any established contacts in the industry? Are they popping out from the middle of nowhere? Do they have an established track line of development? If they don't have any shipped games, do they have like itch.io presence? What is uh as much as I can find that's publicly available is what I'm looking for. I don't go into people's DMs. I don't look at people's uh internal business documents. I'm not like I'm not like
private investigator.
It is It is private investigator work, but there's only so much I can see. Um so, that's what it's like doing it in the games industry.
That's really interesting. So, when you're doing due diligence, Chelsea, on a cross-border games partnership, what's one I'm sure there's many red flags uh that you could potentially look out and think that's something's wrong there. But what's one that really makes you stop and say something isn't adding up here and I've got to investigate this further because it's like a domino effect. I'm sure if I see this, it's going to you know, this

this and this is probably also going to be wrong. What's that one one red flag?
There are a million red flags. And I'm happy to share some at Pocket Gamer Shanghai when I'm there just to help uh studios and investors know like if you see this, it's a no-go. Um but to really sum it up, the majority of common red flags, cuz there's uncommon red flags, like oh my gosh, they popped up on the US Treasury OFAC list and they're a sanctioned entity. I have seen that. That's a huge red You don't really want to be doing business If you're If you're from the US, you don't want to be doing business with a sanctioned entity. Or I've seen people that have like murders in their backgrounds. Kind of a red flag if you're a murderer, but that's that's not common. That's not common in the That's not common in games. I think what I commonly see with small businesses like game studios is a lack of narrative alignment. Um because they may you may be a perfect

business and you might have a perfect pitch and a really enticing game idea, but your business documents aren't necessarily lined up one-to-one like your pitch deck is. So maybe you don't have like a registered company or if you do, the registration hasn't been updated or maybe you have like a website that you don't really have any posts on your social media. So it's like what's your online presence look like? Or maybe you have a founder that has kind of a scandal. Now you can recover from those instances. Like not one of these is a deal breaker, but uh like little things that stick out to you, they can uh makes me question like, "Okay, if this isn't in alignment, what else is in alignment?" So it's just like those little tiny things. If you can get your whole narrative story aligned, especially like you want to have your game narrative aligned, you want to have your business narrative aligned. Those those two are working inherently together. If you have like a strong

business narrative, strong business infrastructure, it will look really good for whoever's trying to evaluate you for money.
Okay, and Chelsea, that's really interesting. I wanted to sort of We talked about this before. You mentioned that you're a very helpful person in the industry. You have all this sort of knowledge that you're willing to share. You mentioned you had a checklist that you kind of referred to that you were willing to share with our audience today. Can you pull up that checklist or do you have it off the top of your head? And can you mention some of those things that are important?
Yeah, so I think what I love about the games industry is all these free resources. When I I getting started, I would go to Indie Game Business and be involved in their Discord to learn more about what is it like doing business in the games industry. I would look at GDC Vault talks. Um, there's so many free resources around, so I knew that when I was coming into the games industry, I wanted to share what I knew about due diligence with the games industry because I I didn't know anything about it and I work in the in freaking due diligence. So, what I did is I created

this self-guided background check framework. So, it's like a little checklist. If you subscribe to our newsletter, Game Intelligence Direct, where you can get all things translated about due diligence and I'm adding academics research for the games industry, like translated for you so it makes sense and it's relevant. That's our newsletter. If you subscribe, you can download our background check checklist. So, there's space for you to like if you're working with a partner, there's space for you to write notes and you can basically go down the checklist and see did this partner have this? Do they have this? Do they have this? Do they have this? If so, this is going to be a steady deal to do. Um, so some tips are like making sure that the if you're working with a company, that they have a corporate registration that you can verify cuz this stuff is really easy to verify publicly um for free most of the time online. You also want to verify if they're like an indie dev with no established background, your risk strategy moves into mitigation. So,

how much do I publicly share with this person before it moves to a corporate channel so I can keep all my documents like together or um what else is something if you're working with an indie dev with a little background? Um, just making sure that they're established in the industry or that someone else can like vouch for them. I think it's really big. Like the games industry is a really small industry, a lot of like really relationship-based. So, word of mouth is actually quite helpful for verifying someone's legit legitimacy. So, that's another tip. Um Yes, so having a LinkedIn profile knows some people hate that, but it's really helpful. It's like part of the language of business and games. If you're in China, it's a little different because they don't really use LinkedIn as much out here in Asia.
I was going to say, what do you think cuz they don't I would imagine they don't actually use LinkedIn that much. What do they use? How do they What's their version of that? Do they even have a version of that?

I feel and I'm still figuring this out myself. When I was at Dow Jones, we didn't There's some Like if you're working with a Chinese developer that has an international presence, they most likely have a LinkedIn, but it's normally quite hard to do due diligence on Chinese partners, especially game devs because it's a country of 1 billion people and when you're doing a name search, it's like a needle in a haystack when you have like John Lee. John Lee is like the most common Sorry, like Chinese words like there's only so many surnames that are commonly used and they all look the same. And then when it comes to first names, there's only so many like first names. So, like when you get like a really common name, it's like John Smith and I'm just like how How do I find you? So, if you're working with a a Chinese If you're trying to do diligence on a Chinese firm, it's really helpful to get the company address and look for whatever identifiers are tied with that name. Sometimes they'll have a LinkedIn if you're lucky, sometimes they won't, but they'll have like other Chinese

narrative like press blog presses about them or interviews that talk about their background and that kind of thing. Um so, it's a little harder to tie that story together, but it's still possible. There's um It's harder for someone that doesn't speak Chinese to do due diligence on a Chinese firm. That's why you hire someone like me.
[laughter]
We can do Chinese due diligence. Um But yeah, as for the checklist, um we made it for free so that anyone that's doing any type of partnership, whether it's with a company or a person, any type of online partnership, it's really helpful for everyone to stay safe and to stay in compliance with these little talked about laws in the games industry just to do your due diligence and we just made that as a free resource for everybody.
Okay, and something that's just come to mind, Chelsea, that's really interesting. But we talked about one of the starkest red flags. due diligence due diligence space. What's something

that's like a commonly made mistake that you could kind of see people doing a lot that you're thinking, okay, well, this can be avoided quite easily?
Common mistake that can be avoided quite easily. Um, let me think. There's a couple and if I got into all of them, we would go past 30 minutes. I think the biggest overarching idea is narrative alignment. So, say you're a founder of a studio, but you don't list that you're the founder on the studio website and you don't list like any type of staff. You don't normally have to list staff, but it's not clear who actually owns the studio. That is kind of a red flag because we want to establish transparency, like who is behind the studio. So, I have seen like some studios that want to stay really private and that's not really helpful from a due diligence perspective. So, it's helpful to even just have one person that you can point to and be

like, okay, this is the person behind the studio. That's really easy, just add like a founder name and that's it. Or you can tag their LinkedIn to add additional legitimacy. Um, another common red flag that I see, yeah, the biggest one is just operational transparency. Like if you don't list where you're based, that's kind of a red flag. I know people want to keep their privacy, but even just having I'm based in this country. You don't have to have the full address. That actually can be a little dangerous if you're like just operating out of your house or you don't have an established office. You want to protect your privacy, but just until we can verify like, "Hey, you exist in this country." Um which is really helpful for international business, you know, you need to comply with the laws of each country or tax laws. Um so that's a really easy thing you can fix. If you don't have where you're based out of, like kind of a red flag. Um cuz then we can't really know like who are you? Who Who do you say you are, you know?
Mhm.

Do you find that studios and companies all all tend to be more private in China? Cuz as I'm speaking to you and Taiwan, um as I'm speaking to you, I'm kind of getting this picture that they do tend to not maybe want to reveal themselves as easily um as we see in the West. Is that something that you're you've experienced out of curiosity?
Yeah, so there's a lot it's a lot harder to get business record information out of China than it is in the States. Like the States has too much information, I would say. Um some differences between getting information in the States and out of China is that for one, a big thing in due diligence is knowing where the money is going to land up. So it's called ultimate beneficial ownership. So if I'm a big investor, I'm going to invest a million dollars, I want to know exactly where that million dollars is going. And so when you're having like a private contract, obviously you would provide that. But then doing the due diligence, someone needs to independently verify outside of your own private documents that you provided that hey, this money is going to go here. So a lot of people pay a lot of money for

us or what I was doing at Dow Jones and for Didi for game for us to verify exactly like who is the owner of the studio and where is this money going. That is very difficult to identify in the US if you're not a publicly traded company because private shareholding information is not publicly available in the States, but in China, uh it's actually publicly available. Your shareholders are listed on your business records. In Japan, shareholders shareholdings? People in leadership are listed in Japanese registry, so you can find out that information as well. Off the top of my head, I can't remember if shareholding information is listed, but in China for sure, it is listed. Um so, you can identify generally where the money is going. So, that's actually like a big difference between US and China. So, that's actually quite helpful um for establishing legitimacy. Now, if you wanted to find out who Jiang Li on the register on the shareholding list is, a little harder. Um but you can find out where if that if

that is an established company, you can find out who is involved with the shareholding, and then you can do your research to do a shareholding tree and see, okay, if um ABC Studios is the 50% shareholder, who's the shareholder of ABC Studios? And then, who's the shareholder of 123 Studios that shareholds 100% of ABC Studios? So, you can keep going up the chain. And that's really important. Yeah.
Super interesting stuff, Chelsea. Now, for Western studios or publishers that are considering a partnership with a Chinese studio right now, what do they most consistently get wrong about where the actual the money is actually coming from? Now, I know you don't work directly in money, but I think that you probably have a decent enough idea um with the experience that you have now. So, what are your thoughts on that?
Where the money is coming from? Do you mean like where grants are coming from? Where like Can you specify the question a little bit?
Funding.

Okay, like funding. Um where their funding is coming from. So, it is a little opaque in China, and I'm not an investor specifically, so I'm not up-to-date on like, okay, there's these five grant opportunities in China for your studio to apply to right now. But from the due diligence perspective, I can say that it is harder to verify exactly where money is coming from if you're not a Chinese language speaker. I think doing any type of due diligence is difficult when you're not the speaker of that language. Like I don't speak Spanish, so I don't really offer um Mexican or Puerto Rican business due diligence because you really need to have expertise or someone with expertise in that region to help you fully understand the business environment there. Um so I think um one of the biggest things people miss when they're doing due diligence with a Chinese studio is or sorry, the funding

grant, right? Uh one of the biggest places where you can get funding, but you may mess up is just like not working with a local partner. I think that's really really really important when doing business with China because it's really hard for someone to enter that market without having a local partner. Like legally, you have to have a local partner. Um so I think that is what I would recommend for anyone that trying to do business in China is really have someone on the ground so they can help you translate your needs and they can advise you.
That's an interesting one. We hear that one a lot from um past interviews is that you must It's almost a a requirement that you must have someone to partner with locally that understands the market, understands the T's and C's surrounding games here cuz it's a completely different ecosystem.
It's completely different. Like you need like publishing um like a publishing license, and you don't really need that anywhere else. Like the Chinese games industry is quite regulated. Um there's lots of regulations around screen time

and gambling mechanics and um it's not my 100% expertise cuz I'm living in Taiwan right now. So, right now I'm really interested in the Taiwanese industry. Very different landscape from the Chinese industry. Very different landscape from the Hong Kong industry. It's not a one-to-one uh like I was I was writing. I was like when you're doing business in China or the Chinese language ecosystem, it's not just copy-paste traditional simplified Sorry, traditional characters into simplified and Google Translate and that's your localization strategy. Like that's not it. Like these are very different business ecosystem. So, it's really important for anyone trying to do business in Asia is to really have a local partner. Yeah.
And really localize is so many separate regions just within what you spoke about there. So interesting. Um Chelsea, before I let you go, you're joining us for Under the Microscope, How Are Chinese Studios Being Funded in 2026 our panel. So, what are you most looking forward to getting into on that panel? And what do you think is going to sort

of surprise people most about that conversation and what you're going to bring to the table?
Yeah, [snorts] so I think when people attend when audiences attend a panel on investment strategies, they're going to be looking for, "Okay, where can I apply right now to get some cash to fund my studio?" So, what I'll be bringing to the panel is something people aren't going to expect like, "How do I shore up my presentation so I look perfect for that investor so they trust me enough to give me that deal that I'm looking for." So, I'll be bringing that perspective um for the studios in the audience. And for the publishers and investors, I'll be ringing their bell like, "Oh my gosh, I did realize that this deal was kind of sketchy, but I didn't know that I was supposed to do a background check on someone before I sent them that invoice of 500,000 USD. Um so yeah, here's some questions I have for you. Like can you just take a look at this document so that it sounds A-OK that there's no crazy red flag?" So, I'm just here to bring awareness uh for both sides of the table. I'm really excited for that.

So excited to have you join us so shortly, Chelsea. Thank you so much for this fascinating conversation and we can't wait to have you join us very, very soon at PGC Summit Shanghai.
Looking forward to it. Thank you so much for inviting me.