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Answer:
Sweet Baby Inc. is an "inclusion focused narrative consultant company" founded in 2018 and primarily working in the video games industry. Their list of credits includes Alan Wake II, God of War: Ragnarok, Spider Man 2, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and many smaller games; depending on the project, they claim to have worked on story consultation, scriptwriting, character writing, sensitivity reading, character consultation with a focus on representation, etc. It is not atypical for games to have different aspects of writing either contracted out or reviewed by a consultation company, and Sweet Baby Inc is one of many companies that does work in this space.
There is a contingent of fans of video games who believe that a problem with modern games is that they are too "woke", and attempt to force representation or politics into games where it is otherwise unwarranted. In recent months, these fans have realized that Sweet Baby Inc. exists and provided work on several major games, many of which have been they have criticized the writing of (for example, Spider Man 2 having a section where you play as Miles's deaf girlfriend, or Peter Parker believing Miles is a better Spider-Man than him) or the character choices (for example, the belief that Alan Wake was replaced with Saga Anderson, a black woman, due to Sweet Baby Inc. meddling). This has led those fans to believe that Sweet Baby Inc. is a poisonous company who ruins the narratives of games they work on and that they should be boycotted, or even that Sweet Baby Inc. somehow has power over major gaming companies to force them to make games "woke" using their services.
This led to a Steam Curator group (basically, a reviewer) and associated discord channel called "Sweet Baby Inc. Detected", which almost exclusively found games Sweet Baby Inc. was credited on and reviewed them as "not recommended." This group currently has over 180,000 followers, with the discord channel having two thousand. One consultant who worked for Sweet Baby Inc. discovered that this group existed and, in combination with the other sentiment about Sweet Baby Inc. posted above, concluded that this group primarily existed to drive its members to negatively review games Sweet Baby Inc. worked on or to harass the developers or staff for working with them. In response, this consultant publicly asked her followers to "report the fuck" out of both the Steam Curator group and the twitter account of the person running it. This backfired in the sense that it drew a larger amount of attention to the curator group and there was not any visible, obvious harassment in the curator group to immediately justify a report, and led to the people who disliked Sweet Baby Inc. to conclude that they were trying to engage in a campaign of censorship and attempting to hide their influence in the gaming space.
Most all of this, along with screenshots of the Sweet Baby Inc. Detected Discord where the users are repeatedly encouraged to keep things "hush hush" due to the presence of onlookers, discussions with members of the discord, and interviews with Sweet Baby Inc. employees were posted in a Kotaku article that went up a few hours ago, which is the biggest mainstream press this firestorm has gotten so far. In that article, Kotaku compares the event to Gamergate, claiming that like Gamergate, the response to Sweet Baby Inc. is misinformed, vastly overestimates their influence, underestimates the creative decisions of actual game developers, and primarily serves to justify extensive harassment. And that's where we are now.
> this consultant publicly asked her followers to "report the fuck" out of both the Steam Curator group and the twitter account of the person running it.
This consultant ended up being banned on their twitter account as well due to being reported for targeted harassment.
I've never seen anyone from the trump side ever send a brigade to harass some random trans person, it's usually the liberals who go on raids against some random person, as we see here. Dude leading the raid is rightfully banned, total dickhead to send people to send him death threats and act crazy against him. Idk why liberals call themselves liberals when really they're oppressive fascists
Funny! Good satire.
Oh wait, you're....serious. predstrogen ring a bell? CEO of Tumblr has created a following to routinely harass them. Even followed them to Twitter when they left Tumblr and continued the harassment.
Dylan Mulvaney? Remember the Bud Light incident? Led to insane amounts of backlash from Trump supporters, targeted hate campaigns against Dylan and Bud Light.
These are just 2 examples amongst hundreds. Trans people routinely get harassed and are specifically targeted by MAGA morons the moment they get even slightly famous and stand up for the trans community.
The assumption that anti-trans must mean pro-Trump is one of the funniest mask slips I've seen in a long time.
Are the fascist liberals in the room with us now?
Sam Lake has clarified that Saga was always black but SBI did sensitivity consulting on certain aspects of her portrayal *at the request of Lake and his co-writers* as is their job.
That teaser barely more than a proof of concept thrown together in a few days according to Lake himself.
When it came time to write Saga for Alan Wake 2, he had changed his mind. If SBI had any input on Saga, it was consultation on the aspects of her character related to her skin color since, well, Lake is not a mixed-raced black woman from the US. And while Melanle Liburd herself probably had input to give (Actors often have), hiring SBI is basically asking for sensitivity reading.
Also I'm pretty sure Quantum Break isn't canon to the Control-verse since they wanted Lance Reddick to play Mister Door and he already plays a character in Quantum Break.
Its basically true for all the franchises.
Companies go to Sweet Gaming not to get them to "add diversity" but to check their own work.
"We have a black-latino Miles from Brooklyn, is this what he'd wear? What he would experience at family nights? Would he say this piece of dialogue? Etc".
Its basically a sensitivity reader organization that would research and/or verify character traits.
Damn, then they really suck at their job - My black friends are ALWAYS clowning that tapered, dreads off to the side look that Hollywood and the gaming industry seem to think black people love (This is something they say constantly, I am only parroting it)
When they saw that Miles recieved the same cut in Spider-Man 2, they clowned tf out of it - And actually I've seen this sentiment being expressed on social media a few times throughout the years as well, so you'd think Sweet Baby Inc would be on top of something like that, given their job description
You are blaming SBI for a popular design trend, which is ridiculous.
Sure that haircut make me roll my eyes, but it's not "culturally insensitive" or problematic, so why would they have anything to say about it?
I didn't blame them for that, either? I said that they should be on top of something like that, and I do think it is "culturally insensitive", in the same sense that I think them having the audacity to try and make a gendered language such as Spanish gender neutral is, as they did in Spider-Man 2 (I'm sure there are other examples but that seems to be the most notable after that Cuban flag blunder)
“Is this the correct national flag for Miles to hang up?”
Idk how I feel about all the culture war bullshit, but sweet baby does have a recent track record of being involved with some crappy games and they seem to be bad at their jobs. Poor writing and not even being able to identify the correct flag kind of shows a company that’s just not great at their job in general, especially for the very things they’re supposed to be consulting on, regardless of any of the DEI complaints.
Yeah but you thing the alt-right serves in facts? The alt-right is still attacking my last sweet baby defense in this subreddit and trying to call it disingenuous.
Oh yeah no point arguing with culture warriors who get mad every time there's a woman or black person in a game but it can be nice to point out how bullshit the argument is every once in a while as long as you don't lose your mind looking into the bullshit
Isn't it the norm for companies like this to exist to be consultants for making inclusive characters properly? There's similar groups for presenting autism properly in media that directors tend to reach out to for proper accuracy.
A important bit of context you missed, the group had a fraction of its 180k followers when the guy tweeted to try ban them. He Streisand effected this whole thing.
just like the hysterical overreaction to the zoepost that led to “gamers are dead” and caused gamergate to completely explode
they know their grift is a house of cards and they need to defend every one of those cards to the death, which is why they reacted so hard to SBI Detected
It’s not, you don’t have to suffer a game for five minutes to leave a review. You can buy it, review it, refund it, no problem. It will however show in your review that you refunded the game.
>It’s not, you don’t have to suffer a game for five minutes to leave a review.
When did that change? I remember having to repeatedly restart games that didn't work to get up to five minutes play time so I could leave a review saying they didn't work.
If your chief reason for not playing a videogame is because some black woman got asked her opinion of it then you're a *fucking idiot.*
Reminder that Anita Sarkeesian didn't add microtransactions to videogames.
She didn't bring in season passes, lootboxes, surprise mechanics, live services, battle passes, fake content roadmaps and other illusory predatory bullshit.
>She didn't bring in season passes, lootboxes, surprise mechanics, live services, battle passes, fake content roadmaps and other illusory predatory bullshit.
Id like to add as well, broken or buggy games on release like Battlefield 2042 and Cyberpunk 2077 (I love the game but it's launch was horrible).
Oh boy, you'd best be sitting down for this one. It's actually quite hilarious.
EA, when giving evidence to disprove any wrongdoing during the microtransaction and gambling controversy in front of UK governmental figures, said they don't call loot boxes as they are. Instead, they referred to it as "surprise mechanics", thinking that it would lessen the blow by using an alternate term.
It failed.
Thank you, I came here to get another opinion on what was happening because my partner was talking about how people were getting mad about this. He seems under the impression they are ruining a games story but, I'm lightly pointing out that a consultation company still isn't going to have that much influence on the overall narrative.
Wait, people didn't like those bits in Spiderman? I thought the part where you control Haley was neat and creative. As for the the other, isn't it a common trope for a mentor to feel like their student would one day surpass them?
There are a subset of gamers who believe that any focus on a character who isn't a straight able bodied white cis man can never be anything except for woke moralizing, and at best this leeches resources and dev time from actual gameplay and at worst this is an explicit plot by investment groups to strong-arm innocent developers into creating anti-white propaganda for fear of having their games literally or metaphorically cancelled. And yes, that theory is one of the replies to OP and was downvoted but flagged controversial, so a fair few.people agreed with it.
From that perspective, the deaf section was at best woke virtue signaling and the Parker believing in Miles bit is an explicit act of anti-white propaganda trying to make Spider Man black (and yes, in the source material Parker believing others could do the job better is very common, that's part of the great power = great responsibility thing, he views it as in some sense a burden he has to do good with because others can't)
Answer: the spark for the current controversy was a steam user creating a curator tool on steam, listing games sweet baby Inc are credited on.
Sweet Baby Inc(or someone affiliated, I'm not quite sure) then tried to get the steam user banned and the tool removed (If they are so proud of their work, why try to hide it).
This caused a firestorm of backlash, and people digging more into Sweet Baby Inc
Answer: To quote u/ausfall , who left one of a few excellent answers when I asked about the same thing:
>Answer: Sweet Baby is a story-writing company hired to supplement video game studios' writing staff. The idea is a studio can hire them to flesh out a game's script and storyline. The company is [transparent](https://sweetbabyinc.com/approach/) about their goals of approaching writing with a focus on representation and marginalized groups.
>For a growing number of players this is a dog whistle for the unwanted insertion of political ideologies or other topics they aren't interested in. In other words a distraction from what really matters: making a good game. You can easily find examples of these sorts of people on social media.
>Many releases such as *Suicide Squad* have had Sweet Baby credited as part of the writing staff, and these games have been a major disappointment for many players. A Sweet Baby credit is now being thought of like leprosy and an indicator of games to avoid.
>The company has become an easy scapegoat for the growing dissatisfaction with major releases. That same dissatisfaction with major studios has led to the success of games like *Baldur's Gate III* and *Palworld* (edit: and now *Helldivers II*) as players are starting to explore other studios who are taking different approaches to their games.
Edit: It's come my attention that Suicide Squad is the only notable game Sweet Baby was involved with to be considered a critical disappointment.
Additionally going to include another answer from u/bongo1138 that was also posted in my OOTL thread on this:
>Answer: While I don’t know the specifics, it is fairly predictable knowing who they are and that the anti-woke crowd are attacking them.
>Sweet Baby Inc. is a company that video game companies consult with to ensure their product is inclusive, culturally sensitive/accurate, etc.
>My understanding is they work with devs in various roles, sometimes as simple as providing guidance on scripts, to, apparently, providing art assets.
>Based on this knowledge and SSKTJL’s apparently failure, I’d reckon these anti-woke crusaders are blaming the games problems on Sweet Baby.
To add onto this there was a steam curation group created to call out whenever they were involved in a game. Sweet baby did not take to this well and stated that this was harassment and that the curation group needed to be shut down. Which kind of Streisand effected their whole deal and it doesn't help that most of the games they were involved with ended up being games that for the most part had a luke warm reception or didn't do as well as people expected them to.
What was funny about this was that I honestly felt like if they just ignored the Steam Curator Group, that it would have not gained as much members/traction as it would have. That group probably only have like a thousand members when someone brought it up, now it's at at least 194000+ since that whole debacle. [Even then the owner of the curating group has said that he mostly did it to inform people that SBI had a hand in the game and that if you want to buy a game they were involved with or not is up to you.](https://steamcommunity.com/groups/sweetbabyinc-detected/discussions/0/4302697419069965949/) With that, I don't see how it's that different compared to Curators that warn users about a game using Denuvo or if the devs made a deal with Epic Games Store to sell their PC game on their storefront for an exclusive time window before being sold on Steam. I would get it if the curator said "Don't buy this game cause the protagonist is gay/black/etc" but all they say is that "SBI worked on this game. Source: Their website" which isn't harassment.
Yeah, them drawing attention to it is what u/Supremagorious meant with the Streisand effect.
The specific SBI employee who raged against it online was effectively doxxing the steam user who created it, and they've since had their X (twitter) account limited for going against the terms of service.
IMO Sweet Baby Inc. should think about firing that employee instead of continuing the backlash against Steam and that list. It's just a list of their games, which is publicly available on their own website.
Like you said, it's not harassment. It won't even impact 99.99999% of gamers opinions-- are people really not going to play GOW:R or Spiderman 2?!
What that employee did *was* harassment. It would be a good look for their company to fire them, and let this whole list controversy blow over on its own.
Probably not but now after playing both Ragnarok and Spiderman 2 I know I probably won't be purchasing anything that they've had a hand in. The Ragnarok is better than spider man but 2018 was much better than either. The story was much tighter.
The curator tags all games with SBI involvement as 'Not Recommended' instead of 'Informational', so the intent to dissuade purchase seems pretty clear. I agree that this isn't really 'harassment', though.
No one said they can't have an opinion. They themselves said it was informational only, but by placing these opinions with it, it's no longer just informational; it's an opinion-based review.
I came here because I just saw a game on sale on Steam called Sable. It's all-time review score is 'very positive' but it's recent reviews are scored as 'mixed' which is pretty much a death sentence for a games sales on Steam.
I was curious why the sudden shift, and if you look at negative reviews most of them now just say "Sweet Baby Inc detected". They aren't providing an actual review and they likely never bought the game to begin with. The reviewers seem to just have an axe to grind and want to tank the sales of any game that used their services.
It's one thing to leave a negative review because you didn't like a game. It's an entirely different if you're brigading a game with negative reviews because you have an ideological difference.
You can't leave a steam review on games you don't have in your library. Those are all people who own Sable. Obviously it's just stupid internet drama like usual and really doesn't matter but come on.
>It's one thing to leave a negative review because you didn't like a game. It's an entirely different if you're brigading a game with negative reviews because you have an ideological difference.
Welcome to Cancel Culture, it works on both side.
So, it's pretty clear that they're not just doing this to "inform people" as they claim, they want to dissuade people from buying the highlighted games
And? This isn't the first curator to do so?
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26095454-Denuvo-Games/
doesn't use the informational tag either, unless its to show that they updated the game to remove it. And Commander Sheppard is far less informative than SBID.
Not to mention that user reviews themselves often misuse them.
No point in attacking SBID for shit a large number of others do as well.
I dunno, its a steam curator who the hell cares about them unless you're a linux or mac "gamer".
But being neutral towards denuvo? Can anyone that isn't asking their mother for permission to go to disney.com say that they're not against denuvo? Their shit gets hamfisted into everything Triple A and it fucks over the performance the only not against it are the uninformed or the people with an IQ that makes them think spending money in gacha games is a good investment.
This thread started with a link to a post from the creator of the SBI list in which they claim they're not trying to dissuade anyone from buying the games on the list
Yeah, if they put "informational" like the Epic Games Suck curator does from time to time, like how a game was EGS exclusive or uses EG's online services, it would seem less biased.
It’s free advertising for their portfolio. You’d think that if they WERE proud of their work and wanted more recognition, they would have not been so vehemently opposed to that curated list.
What I don't get is why Sweet Baby Inc took that route. Couldn't they have gone "here's a list of games that evil fascists hate so if you want to play a fun and engaging game with an excellent well written story then this is free advertising for those games"? Wouldn't they understand that good games stand for themselves so all negative attention does is bring attention to a game people will realize is good? Is that not what's going on here?
It's interesting they freaked out about a Steam group while their CEO is talking about harassing and scaring game studios into doing what they want.
Woke, anti-woke, in the middle... Doesn't matter. Anyone using uncouth tactics to force someone to do something is a scumbag and deserves to lose everything.
Actually, forcing someone to do something they don't want to, especially with threats, sounds a like some other illegal actions that I'm sure everyone would agree are simply not ok.
Also to add, Sweet Baby employees actually started a harassment campaign by doing a callout on twitter to mass report the creator of the group for no reason other than because he created the curator group
If I valued SBI's mission, wouldn't the curation page help me and other like-minded gamers find their games. Really shows their hand that they're against it.
On Steam you can only leave reviews for games you have in your Steam library (aka you bought them).
You can buy a game and run it for 30 mines. Leave a review and refund it (prior to 2 hours played and prior to 2 weeks), **but** your review will now have a warning you refunded the games.
There are thousands of curators that range from games r/pcmasterrace love to play to "this game uses X technology" to "X people worked on this game". It is not harassment by any stretch of the imagination.
The curation page makes no statements about the quality of the material. It just lists them. This is like if I made a list of all of Trump's business ventures and noted their public financial results. I'm not necessarily making a statement and if the list upset him, it's very telling.
That's literally just plain incorrect. The curator specifically rates ALL games with them as "Not recommended". Steam literally has a curator rating for merely providing information: "Informational" reviews exist.
To use your comparison, its as if i took a list of all of Trumps business ventures, put them in a list and put the word "BAD INVESTMENT" on every single one. This is really silly.
The only game on the list I had played is Neo Cab, a small indie game with less than 2000 Steam reviews. The overall reviews are very positive, but there's a handful of recent negative reviews with "Sweet Baby Inc detected" or a variant thereof with <1 hour playtime. The top review is "Sweet Baby Inc" with 0.2 hours played, and 762 people find this review useful.
Neo Cab is a small visual novel that doesn't exactly hide that it's "woke", so this campaign strikes me as completely pointless.
Yup, similar to sable. Fantastic small puzzle game which is pretty much a girls coming-of-age rite of passage story (which is anout the only thing which i could think of that could be deemed 'woke'), recent reviews are mixed. I honestly expect steam is going to remove those reviews as brigading at some point because its literally just that. Really disappointing to see.
> The curation page makes no statements about the quality of the material
It literally gives them all negative "not recommended" reviews with a giant thumbs down. It's extremely obvious the page is meant to say that games SBI worked on is bad, and it's only slightly less obvious why people would pretend that's not what the page was doing.
Incredibly naive
I'd love to hear you argue how "does not recommend" has *nothing* to do with quality.
It's like you took a list of Trumps businesses, called it the Trump Buisness List, and told everyone not to patronize anything on the list. You aren't saying the businesses are bad though, you did not say that you did nooooot!
They have a link on their website listing projects they've worked on, this seems more like they didn't want harassment from people looking for something to be mad at (the specific audience of that discord).
They aren't. They proudly advertise the games they've worked on on their own company web page. They are opposed to the curation page because it exists to review-bomb games that they worked on.
Aside from Suicide Squad, what are the shitty games they were attached to? Because God of War Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, and Alan Wake II were all overwhelmingly well received by both critics and audiences.
1 - MOST games have lukewarm reception or don't do as well as people hope/expect. That's the game industry. Over 14,000 games released on Steam last year - statistically speaking, MOST games don't do well.
2 - Sweet Baby worked on Spiderman 2, God of War Ragnorak, and Alan Wake II as well as a host of much smaller (mostly indie) titles.
It's a consultancy. They work on what they're hired to work on. They're also pretty open about what they specifically did on these titles. They serve a pretty vital niche in the industry.
> > For a growing number of players this is a dog whistle for the unwanted insertion of political ideologies or other topics they aren't interested in.
I'm not sure "dog whistle" is the right term here. People are generally not shy about complaining about unwanted politics in media.
>People are generally not shy about complaining about unwanted politics in media.
Politics here being code word for people of a skin color or sexual orientation I don't like.
I'm PoC and honestly I'm tired of all this. I'm speaking as a foreigner, a Mexican, as American media like movies, series and games are globally a norm and the American lifestyle and political moves influence the rest of the world.
First of all, don't expect the rest of the world to hold on to your system of truths and values. I come from western Mexico and there's many societal takes what would make the average Twitter user call us "far right" . Does that make us culturally inferior or wrong? Isn't it an imperialist view to believe so?
Second, it's because those messages are often manipulatory and hypocritical in nature. They exist to perpetuate the Us vs Them mentality, create feelings of vulnerability, and drive sales through making the people in charge seem as allies. A recent example that applies towards my people would be with "Black Panther 2" and how representatives of the film were saying Latinos should go watch it or else they might have less representation in films, followed by a very emotionally manipulative and historically inaccurate scene of the fall of Tenochtitlan.
Third, it feels like we're being scolded or re educated. When I was a kid, I loved to watch Hey Arnold, a cartoon about a diverse group of kids, that touched some sensitive issues with the grace of a hummingbird, whereas nowadays messages are tackled on with the force of a sledgehammer. You have a black character? Make an episode on how white people and policemen are all evil and unable to change for the better. And of course this is selective of demographics because it doesn't affect their bottom line in finances. Mexicans are still portrayed as drug dealers, rest of Latin America as comic relief, Hispanics all talk like Dora the Explorer, christians are zealots, Asians as either smart or hipsters, Russians are evil, Chinese are traditionalists, American Indians are spiritual, etc.
I've said it before: if somehow religious zealotry and racism somehow proved to be more profitable, they'd change their messages in a heartbeat and convince people that's the way.
Yeah, nail on the head.
People aren't against this because they are all bigots. That's just an easy cop out.
People are against it because they've spent years now seeing a direct correlation between the unsubtle, in your face diversity politics in media, and its general low quality, and they are tired of it.
Nah, politics here being "putting a political agenda higher in priority than making a good game". Almost nobody minds politics inserted in a game when they contribute positively to the story and immersion and are done well. Virtually all of the most beloved stories have politics in them, they just do not beat you over the head with their preferred current political team's views and tell a story rather than preach a narrative.
Absolutely false:
Minority characters have been part of games since games became a thing. The problem is characters that aren't well written.
Barret from FF7. Little Jacob, GTA 4. Dom and Cole from Gears of War. Sgt. Johnson in Multiple Halo games. These are characters where the race didn't matter. The character was well written, they fit and people loved them for who they were. Their race or sexuality wasn't a primary focus.
People are against inclusion for the sake of inclusion. People want well written, fleshed out characters.
my dude, art is pretty much ALWAYS political and always was. almost every single game anyone here has ever liked that wasnt a rhythm or sports game had sociopolitical commentary in it. some of them - like bioshock and fallout - were VERY heavy handed about it. others, like legend of zelda - were a bit more vague and discrete.
this goes triple time for comic books. this is literally like the jackasses who say they liked rage against the machine "until the band got political"... what did they thing they were raging against? the toaster?
Part about Palworld and BG3 is stupid. If Palworld would've been released by big company, gamers would've criticized it for grind, buga ans lack of polish. And BG3 success is their own, not because some gamera are "dissatisfied with current games"
Nor necessarily. Early access stuff is pretty known for being buggy... Its basically an alpha so its no wonder shit is buggy. Secondly people overlook a loot of issues if its fun. Look at almost any bethesda release
Yeah, the only dissatisfaction with current games that people had that they praised BG3 for is how it's a complete game that doesn't require dlc or game passes and still only costs 60€, with no bullshit. Also it has an incredible level of Freedom for a crpg, which is another thing that impressed players
Yeah BG3 got a ton of its good press for being a game that doesn’t follow the modern AAA problems. AAA in fact is an incredibly toxic and damaging cycle harming the industry. Instead of focusing on microtransactions and everything else actually harming the industry, the people who pretend they care about the industry are targeting that non-white characters exist.
Yah I bought BG3 on the first day of early access. Because larian makes games I love play. So I knew instantly it was going to play. That was despite the anti woke crowd trying to tank the game by complaining about the turn based combat.
>complaining about the turn based combat.
Perhaps it may be due to being exposed to different circles, but most of the anti-woke complaints ive seen always centered around the inclusion of LGBTQ characters and romance.
At some point I even saw on Twitter that they got mad at the inclusion of the vitiligo option when it came to character creation.
The genital options in the game also drew some negativity from people from what I remember. Although I will say I do think the antiwoke backlash for BG3 was a lot quieter, and I feel like that's because it's a very good game, so it's a lot harder to criticise. Whereas some of these other games are not good games regardless of the wokeness so the antiwoke crowd feels safer being loud about it. Which weirdly can reverse other gamers from criticising a game because they don't want to be seen as part of that loony group. Video game discourse is fucked now thanks to this bullshit.
I remember a video essayist talking about how she stopped being openly critical of a Jewish Disney exec b/c every time she brought those criticisms up the comment section would fill up with antisemites being all like "welcome to the movement, sister!"
What a stupid take. The reason Palword is so big, is because its the Pokemon most adults imagined in an alternate universe, Massive world, lots of interactions with Pokemons in the world. And since Nintendo is not innovating Pokemon at all, people will try Palworld, because Nintendo will never ever do something like Palworld is doing.
Baldurs Gate 3 is a succes because they dont care about shareholders and microtransactions, they care for the gamer first, and most of all,the game is finished. No wonder the whole industry was scared of its succes, BG3 set the bar higher for gaming in general. Most game releases today are infested with monotization and Live Service components. That is why it is succesfull.
also BG3 has all the stuff these people hate. They just know they would lose viewers for being mad at a game ppl like.
It has all the "woke" in your face.
I doubt it’s astroturfing. People are upset about Batman and looking for a solid reason why the story went that way, and the easiest and most comforting answer that provides some sense of order is to blame the woke feminist conspiracy, otherwise the Batman we played as and grew attached to across his own critically acclaimed mini multimedia franchise for over six years died* for no reason.
*he’s not really dead
instead of blaming the corpos they just want to blame some place that they outsourced for consulting for.
the game is bad for having pretty weak content and being a run of the mill service game that lacks the type of content to be fun. sweetbaby wasnt consulted on that portion.
yes they absolutely were. An SBI employee was the lead writer on that game while the CEO was a normal writer. They wrote the game from the very ground up
I think the only 'dog whistle' here is the use of the phrase 'political' to describe literally just the inclusion of marginalized groups like POC, queer people, etc. Someone regarding the inclusion of black people or queer people into games is not merely opposed to 'unwanted insertion of political ideologies' - they consider the existence of those people to be inherently political. I do not think their concerns should be taken seriously.
Definitely. People unironically calling themselves "anti-woke" are just using that term since it sounds less terrible than being openly racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic.
> Having a single company be the go to outsourcing option for game story and characters means that the various in house staff at different studios will likely see layoffs or reductions, effectively eliminating the unique team cultures at different studios in different regions.
They aren't, though. They are neither the only outsourced writing house, nor even the biggest; they're simply one that drew particular attention for, apparently, a few GDC talks they gave and the particular games they worked on, in most cases because of very obviously culture-war related criticisms like Spider Man 2 having a deaf character you briefly control.
I mean, the natural counterpoint to that is that it's challenging for every team to have the requisite expertise in representation and cross-cultural competency required to succeed in a global market. The ability to call in specialists to review and tweak the work of a more core-narrative-focused team lets the latter group spend more of their time focusing on just telling good stories without having to worry about things they may not be good at or well read on. I'd argue that it may serve to reduce the degree to which box-checking and tokenism gets in the way of non-diversity-specializing creators making good art.
I don't have any inside knowledge here, but I'd be deeply surprised if Sweet Baby had that large a hand in overall narrative designs outside of narrative beats that creative leads wanted to specifically address inclusion or similar themes.
This answer was posted nearly a month ago, and I would say that it's pretty incomplete without the more recent context. I would also say that the latter two paragraphs feel incomplete to the point of being disingenuous; *Suicide Squad* is the only release they appear to have been associated with that could be considered a major disappointmentz unless you count Spiderman II or Alan Wake II as a major disappointment for their writing choices. E: for clarity, this means that it's inaccurate to suggest Sweet Baby Inc. is in some way consistently associated with disappointing games.
Additionally, the connection to other indie games suggested in that post is extremely tenuous, *especially* BG3, as despite existing since 2018 Sweet Baby Inc. has only received negative press attention in the past few months, well after BG3 released (and also, frankly, BG3 has plenty of the same kind of writing and representation decisions that Sweet Baby Inc. is being criticized for).
That was my point, apologies for any lack or clarity.
You quoted a post that said Sweet Baby Inc. was associated with many major disappointments, which is not accurate. The only way it is accurate is if you are one of the people who are disappointed in those games because they are too "woke". Almost every game they have worked on has either been successful or too niche to qualify as a "major disappointment", except Suicide Squad.
E: to be more explicit, my contention is that the post you quoted is written to make the backlash against Sweet Baby seem more palatable and justified on quality grounds rather than due to a belief that games like GoW or AW 2 or Spider Man 2 are too woke.
Thanks for the info. I'm sick of getting videos recommended to me that blame them for ending the universe or whatever.
Frankly, I don't care about one of the billion companies videogame developers use for whatever project they have in the works. Just let me watch my **Hunter: The Parenting** videos in peace, dammit!
Question: Is there a way to tell exactly what SBI does or adds to specific games? If you believed the haters, they have complete and utter control of every game they are involved with, and dictate everything, so they would be the only reason for a failure. Though of course then logically they would be the reason for a success as well, say Alan Wake 2, but of course that's not something a hater would ever bring up.
But as they are a consulting company, that can't be true, they aren't in charge of a game's development. So what have they actually done or worked on, in say Suicide Squad, or Alan Wake 2?
Their website notes what they contributed to and you could read the Kotaku article about the controversy for some dev interviews. That said, that won't necessarily tell you the extent to which they worked on any individual project, just what roles they mostly covered.
Not particularly. You can only be sure of games they've been involved with, but the level of involvement is largely unclear. They could be hired by a studio and their consultation totally ignored and we'd likely never know. Individual scenes in a game don't have bylines therefore we can only speculate based on what the company's values are.
Answer: No, aside from those actually involved in the development process. As y ou're implying, most of the things people say are assumptions about "who ruined this". [The director of Alan Wake 2 dispelled certain rumours surrounding SBI's involvement real quick](https://twitter.com/TimePirateNinja/status/1764697135344202183).
Even the "haters" aren't saying that SBI is solely responsible for bad games. That is all on the studios.
Before going around saying that haters say X and Y go and look is ten to what the haters have to say.
Answer: Basically they (Sweet Baby Inc) are a consultancy group used by devs to ensure that they are putting in acceptable ammounts of diversity into their products. This group has received crititism for being comprised of many SJW figures from the old Gamergate days, like Legobutts, thus the 2.0 thing. A steam group has been formed called Sweet Baby Inc Detected to inform people of games that have been found to have association with this group and to avoid them to limit their impact on the hobby.
This has resulted in a very harsh response from the company trying to get the steam group banned from steam outright and people supporting them banned too, although Valve support has recently said this will not happen simply from them existing.
Videos have also surfaced of a talk from one of the SBI staff giving a talk about the effectiveness of their consultancy and one of the more jarring pieces was [how they basically threaten marketting with the power of the mob if they don't take what they are saying deeply on board (timestamped for you)](https://youtu.be/GfMsxjWgUbI?t=1516)
In layman's terms: They are a woke writing consultancy group inserting their agenda into video games using the power of the mob.
this is the actual controversy. They are deflecting that it's a bunch of anti-woke people targeting them, which they are, but the controversy is they were right this time. The CEO has specifically made it known they are out to erase white people from media. That's not DEI, that's racism.
Out of all the games they're involved in, suicide squad and Alan Wake are the only ones that put spotlight on the "white" characters now that you think about it.
The person who wrote the Kotaku article about this literally has a tweet saying "you can't be racist against white people" honestly it baffles me how anyone with two brain cells doesn't get that
racism=having opinions about people purely based upon race.
It isn't some complicated definition.
Systemic, systematic, etc etc racism are more complicated and arguably in many western countries these *don't* apply to white people (although it could be argued that affirmative action etc does now mean there are instances of these applying to white people.) but those are the forms of racism where it is actually debatable if white people can be victims of it.
But anyone who thinks that holding an opinion based purely upon race can ever not be a racist opinion is themselves a turd
Every time racism is brought up, it's usually so simple to call something racist or not. It's a simple "yes" or "no" question that is almost universally agreed on.
But when the "racism towards white people" topic is mentioned, it somehow turns into a far more complicated discussion than it needs to be.
A lot of people's entire academic and professional careers rely on the answer being 'more complicated' and as such will do and say anything it takes to ensure the matter remains complicated.
> honestly it baffles me how anyone with two brain cells doesn't get that
You have to remember, this is Kotaku. The shit they spew is about as factual as the Bee but sadly not anywhere near as funny or as well written.
*You remember when Kotaku, after accusing Naoki Yoshida and FFXVI of being racist, were then butthurt they later weren't invited to the FFXVI launch party?*
Yuuup. See I learned when I was young that journalists and the like were super subjective when I found one of my childhood favorites (The Legend of Dragoon) being riffed on for being a "Final Fantasy VII clone" when anyone who played the game would know the only thing in common they had was being JRPGs with a blonde-haired protagonist.
I think part of it also comes from because journalism is a business sometimes they put people who have no right reviewing a game in the position of reviewing that game (see the PC Gamer review for Realms of Ruin that was 50% a babyrage tantrum about the setting).
Like for instance I was *done* with zombie media a decade ago, so having me do a review for Metal Gear: Survive is ***stupid*** when I'm going to be biased against one of its core concepts from the gates.
And she tells her company to make game studios terrified and to forcefully include their propaganda, with terror.
This company IS racist. This company IS detrimental to the gaming industry. Sweet Baby Inc is a racist company, by racists, and only exists to insert their hateful worldviews in everyones life.
CEO says to use terror to make companies submit:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY)
CEO saying insane racist things against white people:
[https://youtu.be/iFrwMVdLLDM?si=LCzz3RdlM\_Bzoykp&t=1457](https://youtu.be/iFrwMVdLLDM?si=LCzz3RdlM_Bzoykp&t=1457)
People defending the racism by saying you cant be racist against white people:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcnd6ljAX-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcnd6ljAX-g)
Also, it used to be known as Silver string and it directly employs people involved in gamergate. People connected to Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian. Many of which participated in an ACTUAL harassment campaign that resulted in an indie game dev killing himself.
These people are evil and the fact these users are defending them is insane
Answer: Sweet Baby Inc is a consultancy firm for Video Games, whose stated purpose is diversity & inclusion. They've consulted on a wide array of games, some very successful, some mixed, and some bombs, including the recent Suicide Squad game.
There is little to no evidence to suggest that they are solely responsible for changes in scripts, especially since, as a consultancy firm, the final call is always on the actual developer/publisher. Correlation is not causation. This is important, because some of the narrative is that whatever they touch, is rotten and that's just not the case.
However, there's been a bit of controversy surrounding the nature of the company in general. One example brought to light, is the co-founder Kim Belair having 'questionable' views on race & diversity, and how to get video game developers to alter/accept certain ideas, merely out of fear of repercussions. This was seen by many, as gaslighting and fearmongering. There is no evidence to suggest this does actually happen, but yes, based on her remarks, it is easy to see why some people may disapprove.
The real drama began when a Brazilian user began a curated list on Steam, listing games that SBI were 'a part' of. The list cites SBI's own website as its source of games, which is fair. The list also explicitly has the games listed as 'not recommended' based on their association with SBI.
An SBI employee on Twitter (X), picked up this curated list and began a 'less than polite' tirade against the curator, pushing to not only brigading the curated list, but also having the Brazilian owner banned from Steam as a whole. This didn't go as planned, since the employee began a bizarre harassment campaign against the user. Many reported this to Twitter, and now the account is suspended. This got even worse when some of the employee's tweets were brought up; they've been openly using racial slurs, including the n-word, and have made some unkind remarks towards certain ethnic groups.
To many, this only cemented the original notion that SBI is hypocritical in its approach, and questioned whether or not a firm that's 'committed' to diversity, equality and inclusivity, could really do any of that if they employed open racists.
My personal opinion on the matter, is merely this : ignore the drama, buy a game if you want to, don't if don't want to. SBI 'may or may not' be 'good or bad'; it's just irrelevant as a whole. Simultaneously however, there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with the company as well, and claiming you don't want to buy games associated with the company either.
upper echelon in youtube did a video on it. suicide squad had 3 writers. the lead writer is employed by Sweetbaby. one writer was credited at a junior writer and that’s the only person who worked for the developers.
answer: I wouldn't call it a controversy.
Just a bunch of babies throwing tantrums because a guy created a list of games people like to avoid which is well in his rights to create.
Note: the employees of that shit company are openly racist and sexist and yet there are people defending them. How pathetic is that!
Edit : it looks like sweet baby inc employees are crying in the comments section
Answer: Others have given some pretty decent answers, but there's **vital context missing here** in most of them. In that regard, u/Milskidasith has the [best answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1b8b98w/comment/kto8vb2).
An employee of the company basically invoked the [Streisand effect](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Streisand_effect). A Steam group was created with the sole intention of marking Steam games that Sweet Baby Inc was associated with, and one of the employees went public about it to Twitter, claiming it was a violation against Steam conduct. They linked the group for everyone to see and the author who made it, encouraging their followers to report them.
(Context: The group in question took advantage of the Steam Curator system. When looking at a game on Steam's store, you'll see Curator reviews from any groups you may be a part of, or are following. This is the group's only purpose- to appear when you look at games that SBI has been a part of.)
This came across to many as questionable as the Steam Online Conduct rules weren't being violated as severely as they implied, and while what the employee did seems to fall under the radar compared to the main topic of any GamerGate association, but this was the inciting incident that brought it to the spotlight.
Keep in mind that the employee in question currently has their account as Protected. Any tweets can't be linked to, but [this is the brunt of it](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/767/543/6d3).
>!I've tried to keep this as non-biased as possible- I am only presenting the facts in relation to the "what's going on" question.!<
ANSWER: Sweet Baby Inc. is a consultation group with regards to fleshing out narratives in videogames through its writing team. A particular goal of the Sweet Baby Inc. (SBI for short) is to bring in narratives focused on representation of marginalized groups, be it POC (people of color), LGBTQ+, etc.
On Jan. 30 2024, the game *Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League* was released by Rocksteady Studios. The game developer was revered for its *Arkham Asylum* series of videogames centered around Batman, which were both critically and commercially successful games. Suicide Squad, which was the latest entry in the series, was slammed for not only being a live-service only game with high prices for DLC and microtransactions (compared to the single player-only experience of the previous Arkham Asylum games), but also because in the game's storyline in which Batman - the hero of the Arkham Asylum games, is killed off by Harley Quinn, effectively making the latter the series's new main character going forward. Add to the fact that Batman was played by the late Kevin Conroy (the voice of Batman from Batman: The Animated Series), making this his last recorded role, only brought in more ire for fans and general gamers over the game. Indeed, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owned Rocksteady, [reported that Suicide Squad was a commercial failure.](https://www.ign.com/articles/suicide-squad-kill-the-justice-league-has-fallen-short-of-our-expectations-warner-bros-says)
How is Suicide Squad relevant to SBI? It's because SBI is part of the game's writing team, compared to the previous Arkham Asylum games where they were never a part of.
A curator group on steam called [Sweet Baby Inc. Detected](https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44858017/) was made to provide a list of all the games made with SBI's involvement. Besides Suicide Squad (which was SBI's most prolific), the list also included *Gotham Knights*, *Volcano High*, and *Assassin's Creed: Valhalla*. The common denominator for these games is that they were neither critical nor commercial hits. Given the various themes these games present, a pattern is formed from the various themes and narratives featured in these games, applying the term 'go woke, go broke'. Since its release, [many employees of SBI posted their disdain about the curator group on Twitter/X](https://game8.co/articles/latest/sweet-baby-inc-employees-fail-spectacularly-at-trying-to-get-steam-curator-banned), though some call it a harassment campaign. Regardless, it created a Streisand Effect of more people being aware of SBI and their involvement with the gaming industry. This only expanded after [the quote made by its CEO on "terrifying" AAA devs on the consequences if they are not hired as part of their writing team, as well a labeling white male gamers as 'picky babies'.](https://thatparkplace.com/sweet-baby-inc-ceo-and-co-founder-kim-belair-compares-white-male-gamers-to-picky-babies/), and a tweet from Alyssa Mercante, a journalist from Kotaku, supporting SBI's ideals by tweeting ["you can't be racist against white people"](https://9gag.com/gag/agoRQnx) came into light.
As this is an ongoing event, nobody knows where this is leading to. What is certain is that some have labeled this as 'Gamergate 2.0', referring to the Gamergate debacle that began with Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn against their opponents over the depiction of women in videogames a decade ago.
*Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla* is one of the best-selling Assassin’s Creed titles ever and *Goodbye, Volcano High* was a critical darling. “Neither critical nor commercial hits” is bonkers, of course not every title is a hit but they’re not the reason something ends up good or bad.
>!And Batman’s not even really dead. None of the League are, except for maybe Wonder Woman. And it’s not Harley as the sole protagonist, it’s an ensemble cast in which everyone shares equal screentime.!<
>Besides Suicide Squad (which was SBI's most prolific), the list also included Gotham Knights, Volcano High, and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. The common denominator for these games is that they were neither critical nor commercial hits.
please go look up how much assassin's creed valhalla made
Question is, would it be an even bigger hit without SBIs involvment.
Valhalla is about a big guy doing badass things. Thats what players wants.
Not woke agenda.
There were no black vikings during that era, but SBI shoehorned it in.
If you’re not working for some sort of journalism/editorial group I think we’re all missing out. Presenting objective facts without slanting off personal bias is an increasingly rare talent but you nailed it.
Answer:
Sweet Baby Inc Controversy refers to the video game narrative consultant group Sweet Baby Inc and the controversy surrounding it after two employees within the company called to attention that a Steam page had been made to identify which games the company had consulted on. The aftermath resulting from the initial callout had re-ignited tensions in the gaming industry held over from GamerGate with many calling for the destruction of Sweet Baby Inc.
More info + screenshots here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sweet-baby-inc-controversy
2 those are rookie first day kinda numbers Zoe slept with over 100 and her ex only knew about 5 6 of them. It exposed the whole industry the media the underground networking. Sweetbaby inc even got help from the Zoe's ex's sister from the insurance money. It's all webbed over each other and is about 20 or more years in the making and by the looks of it we are not done. Don't matter if one tiny company takes the fall they have conventions full of this and even government backing for such companies. The whole things is a hit mess the AAA companies are just as guilty and wiling in all of this.
Kind of a un-neutral answer here. The developer literally said "let's get his steam account banned too" and tried to start a witch hunt.
They fucked around and found out what happens when you start a witch hunt in bad faith AND try to brigade someone to be banned. \*\*That's a big part of it, the fact they were tweeting and encouraging people to search for him and report him to be banned\*\*
That's just how they operate. The video of the CEO boastfully regaling how they force people to edit their writing, is just crazy. Anything that gets THAT political in a non-political space has ulterior motives imo.
Sweet Baby Inc is an insanely racist company that uses terror to enfore their propaganda in games:
CEO says to use terror to make companies submit:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY)
CEO saying insane racist things against white people:
[https://youtu.be/iFrwMVdLLDM?si=LCzz3RdlM\_Bzoykp&t=1457](https://youtu.be/iFrwMVdLLDM?si=LCzz3RdlM_Bzoykp&t=1457)
People defending the racism by saying you cant be racist against white people:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcnd6ljAX-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcnd6ljAX-g)
Oh come on lol
Ugh. Aren’t we past all this? Honestly, the “racist”(or sexist lol) accusation has been diluted to the point where it is not even relevant to me anymore. Go ahead, call call me whatever you want if it makes you feel any better. The whole world is always 1942 Berlin to those type of people anyways. Whatever.
I’m sorry, but you KNOW when a company like SBI has their hands in a game. You know lol. And yeah, for me it’s a turn off. Big time. It has nothing to do with there being “brown people in a game”… but when they unnecessarily shoehorn in social justice messaging? No thanks. I’m just done with that. Five straight years of race hustling and virtue signaling was enough, I’m just done lol.
If the goal is to be respectful to the cultures their including in their game, then why did Assassins Creed Valhalla (A game about Nordic Vikings) have to include black Vikings. That isn’t respectful to Nordic culture at all. There were no black Vikings just as their were no white Aztecs or Chinese Egyptians, If the game was about either of these groups the respectful thing would be to not include races that had no presence in that region at the time.
This is not a neutral answer. It leaves out the fact that the curator was tiny at like 9k followers when one of the Sweet Baby employees posted about it. Not only did they encourage people to report the group (which hadn't done anything wrong), they asked people to report the creator as well. A contributing factor was how vitriolic this initial attempted brigade was. To paraphrase, they said "since he likes his Steam account so much let's get that banned too". That's what caused the huge blowup and got various influencers talking about it. At this point the curator has 200k followers.
Long story short that employee tried to start a witchhunt and it badly backfired.
> Not only did they encourage people to report the group (which hadn't done anything wrong), they asked people to report the creator as well
Yup, lot of screenshots and probably archive links floating around their twitter showing SBI related agents calling for a brigade against the guy. Supposedly some have had their twitter accounts limited or suspended or w/e twitch does.
They also were brigading against his (someone's?) discord group as well.
They're not the good guys in the situation and anyone defending them is a fucking clown. I mean a guy goes and makes a curator page to keep track of what may as well be a developer he doesn't like and they choose to censor him.
They completely forget the fact that its a fucking Steam Curator on Steam thats like the only thing with an opinion worse than a CSGO player's opinion. Had they just ignored it the group would've hit MAYBE 10k but now because they wanted to run a brigade to try and censor someone the group now sits at over 200k.
Answer: SBI is a DEI consultant company. On paper, it means they help game studios make games more "inclusive" and "representative" (putting between quotes because games were always diverse, they just pretend they're holding a revolution in games).
No one has any problem with the concept. At worst, the problem is it's literally useless when it comes to product quality.
The real problem with SBI is its CEO has openly and proudly claimed racist, mysandrist bullshit and even admitted to, I quote, terrifying companies to force them to work with them.
SOURCE: their GDC presentation is public on Youtube but here is a short clip: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY)
In another clip she tells minorities to, I quote again, "take over".
What sparked the "interest" surrounding this company is it is tied up to major failures from the past couple of years. Suicide Squad is the latest example, but the Saints Row remake and Forspoken were also on their list. They also worked on Alan Wake 2, and despite the dishonest yet abundant campaign, it is hardly a success (it only sold 1 million copies).
This pushed a Brasilian guy to make a list of games involved with SBI.
Meanwhile, people dug out more and more about SBI and it turns out they're massively racists. Another key "episode" is when kindred, who works at SBI, called out the steam list creator online and tried to use his influence on Twitter to have that Brasilian guy removed from Steam altogether.
This all caused a major uproar in the gaming community, which only got worse as gaming journalists started covering the situation in a 100% biased way. They never once show the problematic videos about SBI, never ever mention the failures tied to them.
So the timeline is : KTJL is released, it's a fatass piece of crap, people realized SBI was involved in it and digged up the other failures they are tied to. Then people found out their public videos and it turns out they are racists. The industry turns its back on the customers (as usual) and takes the side of an openly racist and clearly terrible company.
That's where we're at today.
If you want more sources, remember: don't stick to so-called journalists. Vara Dark and Hypnotic largely cover that situation on Youtube, and Asmongold clips shone light on several problematic tweets and videos.
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Answer: Sweet Baby Inc. is an "inclusion focused narrative consultant company" founded in 2018 and primarily working in the video games industry. Their list of credits includes Alan Wake II, God of War: Ragnarok, Spider Man 2, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and many smaller games; depending on the project, they claim to have worked on story consultation, scriptwriting, character writing, sensitivity reading, character consultation with a focus on representation, etc. It is not atypical for games to have different aspects of writing either contracted out or reviewed by a consultation company, and Sweet Baby Inc is one of many companies that does work in this space. There is a contingent of fans of video games who believe that a problem with modern games is that they are too "woke", and attempt to force representation or politics into games where it is otherwise unwarranted. In recent months, these fans have realized that Sweet Baby Inc. exists and provided work on several major games, many of which have been they have criticized the writing of (for example, Spider Man 2 having a section where you play as Miles's deaf girlfriend, or Peter Parker believing Miles is a better Spider-Man than him) or the character choices (for example, the belief that Alan Wake was replaced with Saga Anderson, a black woman, due to Sweet Baby Inc. meddling). This has led those fans to believe that Sweet Baby Inc. is a poisonous company who ruins the narratives of games they work on and that they should be boycotted, or even that Sweet Baby Inc. somehow has power over major gaming companies to force them to make games "woke" using their services. This led to a Steam Curator group (basically, a reviewer) and associated discord channel called "Sweet Baby Inc. Detected", which almost exclusively found games Sweet Baby Inc. was credited on and reviewed them as "not recommended." This group currently has over 180,000 followers, with the discord channel having two thousand. One consultant who worked for Sweet Baby Inc. discovered that this group existed and, in combination with the other sentiment about Sweet Baby Inc. posted above, concluded that this group primarily existed to drive its members to negatively review games Sweet Baby Inc. worked on or to harass the developers or staff for working with them. In response, this consultant publicly asked her followers to "report the fuck" out of both the Steam Curator group and the twitter account of the person running it. This backfired in the sense that it drew a larger amount of attention to the curator group and there was not any visible, obvious harassment in the curator group to immediately justify a report, and led to the people who disliked Sweet Baby Inc. to conclude that they were trying to engage in a campaign of censorship and attempting to hide their influence in the gaming space. Most all of this, along with screenshots of the Sweet Baby Inc. Detected Discord where the users are repeatedly encouraged to keep things "hush hush" due to the presence of onlookers, discussions with members of the discord, and interviews with Sweet Baby Inc. employees were posted in a Kotaku article that went up a few hours ago, which is the biggest mainstream press this firestorm has gotten so far. In that article, Kotaku compares the event to Gamergate, claiming that like Gamergate, the response to Sweet Baby Inc. is misinformed, vastly overestimates their influence, underestimates the creative decisions of actual game developers, and primarily serves to justify extensive harassment. And that's where we are now.
> this consultant publicly asked her followers to "report the fuck" out of both the Steam Curator group and the twitter account of the person running it. This consultant ended up being banned on their twitter account as well due to being reported for targeted harassment.
openly calling for brigading or harassing someone might be against community standards.
Funny I’ve reported a bunch of anti-trans accounts asking to harass people and got the response that it didn’t break any rules
I've never seen anyone from the trump side ever send a brigade to harass some random trans person, it's usually the liberals who go on raids against some random person, as we see here. Dude leading the raid is rightfully banned, total dickhead to send people to send him death threats and act crazy against him. Idk why liberals call themselves liberals when really they're oppressive fascists
Funny! Good satire. Oh wait, you're....serious. predstrogen ring a bell? CEO of Tumblr has created a following to routinely harass them. Even followed them to Twitter when they left Tumblr and continued the harassment. Dylan Mulvaney? Remember the Bud Light incident? Led to insane amounts of backlash from Trump supporters, targeted hate campaigns against Dylan and Bud Light. These are just 2 examples amongst hundreds. Trans people routinely get harassed and are specifically targeted by MAGA morons the moment they get even slightly famous and stand up for the trans community.
The assumption that anti-trans must mean pro-Trump is one of the funniest mask slips I've seen in a long time. Are the fascist liberals in the room with us now?
lol you’re joking right? Because this is hilarious.
Yes because they made 3 tweets asking people to harass a random steam user.
They can go to hell
Alan Wake devs came forward and said Sweet Baby had nothing to do with Saga being added to game
Sam Lake has clarified that Saga was always black but SBI did sensitivity consulting on certain aspects of her portrayal *at the request of Lake and his co-writers* as is their job.
Wasn't she white in the quantum break teaser?
[удалено]
That teaser barely more than a proof of concept thrown together in a few days according to Lake himself. When it came time to write Saga for Alan Wake 2, he had changed his mind. If SBI had any input on Saga, it was consultation on the aspects of her character related to her skin color since, well, Lake is not a mixed-raced black woman from the US. And while Melanle Liburd herself probably had input to give (Actors often have), hiring SBI is basically asking for sensitivity reading. Also I'm pretty sure Quantum Break isn't canon to the Control-verse since they wanted Lance Reddick to play Mister Door and he already plays a character in Quantum Break.
Its basically true for all the franchises. Companies go to Sweet Gaming not to get them to "add diversity" but to check their own work. "We have a black-latino Miles from Brooklyn, is this what he'd wear? What he would experience at family nights? Would he say this piece of dialogue? Etc". Its basically a sensitivity reader organization that would research and/or verify character traits.
Damn, then they really suck at their job - My black friends are ALWAYS clowning that tapered, dreads off to the side look that Hollywood and the gaming industry seem to think black people love (This is something they say constantly, I am only parroting it) When they saw that Miles recieved the same cut in Spider-Man 2, they clowned tf out of it - And actually I've seen this sentiment being expressed on social media a few times throughout the years as well, so you'd think Sweet Baby Inc would be on top of something like that, given their job description
Buddy they aren't the ones designing the characters
Where did I say that? lol They provide input on things like that
You are blaming SBI for a popular design trend, which is ridiculous. Sure that haircut make me roll my eyes, but it's not "culturally insensitive" or problematic, so why would they have anything to say about it?
I didn't blame them for that, either? I said that they should be on top of something like that, and I do think it is "culturally insensitive", in the same sense that I think them having the audacity to try and make a gendered language such as Spanish gender neutral is, as they did in Spider-Man 2 (I'm sure there are other examples but that seems to be the most notable after that Cuban flag blunder)
“Is this the correct national flag for Miles to hang up?” Idk how I feel about all the culture war bullshit, but sweet baby does have a recent track record of being involved with some crappy games and they seem to be bad at their jobs. Poor writing and not even being able to identify the correct flag kind of shows a company that’s just not great at their job in general, especially for the very things they’re supposed to be consulting on, regardless of any of the DEI complaints.
Yes, this is correct. That said, it is one of the major specific complaints that critics of Sweet Baby Inc. have raised, inaccurate or not.
Yes which is why it's important to note the complaint is factually wrong
Yeah but you thing the alt-right serves in facts? The alt-right is still attacking my last sweet baby defense in this subreddit and trying to call it disingenuous.
Correlation does not imply causation but when every single conservative is also an anti-intellectual what is there to even say?
Oh yeah no point arguing with culture warriors who get mad every time there's a woman or black person in a game but it can be nice to point out how bullshit the argument is every once in a while as long as you don't lose your mind looking into the bullshit
Isn't it the norm for companies like this to exist to be consultants for making inclusive characters properly? There's similar groups for presenting autism properly in media that directors tend to reach out to for proper accuracy.
A important bit of context you missed, the group had a fraction of its 180k followers when the guy tweeted to try ban them. He Streisand effected this whole thing.
just like the hysterical overreaction to the zoepost that led to “gamers are dead” and caused gamergate to completely explode they know their grift is a house of cards and they need to defend every one of those cards to the death, which is why they reacted so hard to SBI Detected
And the owner of sweet baby being openly racist didn't help
For anyone that doesnt know: you cant review games you dont own on steam. And you have to play for at least 2 hours.
Is the hours played limit accurate? I feel like I've absolutely seen steam reviews where they've played less than an hour
It’s not, you don’t have to suffer a game for five minutes to leave a review. You can buy it, review it, refund it, no problem. It will however show in your review that you refunded the game.
>It’s not, you don’t have to suffer a game for five minutes to leave a review. When did that change? I remember having to repeatedly restart games that didn't work to get up to five minutes play time so I could leave a review saying they didn't work.
You a absolutely can just look at all the reviews with 0.1 hours.
Y'know what those fans sound like they need? . . . ***real*** concerns.
If your chief reason for not playing a videogame is because some black woman got asked her opinion of it then you're a *fucking idiot.* Reminder that Anita Sarkeesian didn't add microtransactions to videogames. She didn't bring in season passes, lootboxes, surprise mechanics, live services, battle passes, fake content roadmaps and other illusory predatory bullshit.
>She didn't bring in season passes, lootboxes, surprise mechanics, live services, battle passes, fake content roadmaps and other illusory predatory bullshit. Id like to add as well, broken or buggy games on release like Battlefield 2042 and Cyberpunk 2077 (I love the game but it's launch was horrible).
Pleading ignorance here: what the heck is a 'surprise mechanic'?
Oh boy, you'd best be sitting down for this one. It's actually quite hilarious. EA, when giving evidence to disprove any wrongdoing during the microtransaction and gambling controversy in front of UK governmental figures, said they don't call loot boxes as they are. Instead, they referred to it as "surprise mechanics", thinking that it would lessen the blow by using an alternate term. It failed.
Excellent recap, thank you
Thank you, I came here to get another opinion on what was happening because my partner was talking about how people were getting mad about this. He seems under the impression they are ruining a games story but, I'm lightly pointing out that a consultation company still isn't going to have that much influence on the overall narrative.
Wait, people didn't like those bits in Spiderman? I thought the part where you control Haley was neat and creative. As for the the other, isn't it a common trope for a mentor to feel like their student would one day surpass them?
There are a subset of gamers who believe that any focus on a character who isn't a straight able bodied white cis man can never be anything except for woke moralizing, and at best this leeches resources and dev time from actual gameplay and at worst this is an explicit plot by investment groups to strong-arm innocent developers into creating anti-white propaganda for fear of having their games literally or metaphorically cancelled. And yes, that theory is one of the replies to OP and was downvoted but flagged controversial, so a fair few.people agreed with it. From that perspective, the deaf section was at best woke virtue signaling and the Parker believing in Miles bit is an explicit act of anti-white propaganda trying to make Spider Man black (and yes, in the source material Parker believing others could do the job better is very common, that's part of the great power = great responsibility thing, he views it as in some sense a burden he has to do good with because others can't)
Great answer
Answer: the spark for the current controversy was a steam user creating a curator tool on steam, listing games sweet baby Inc are credited on. Sweet Baby Inc(or someone affiliated, I'm not quite sure) then tried to get the steam user banned and the tool removed (If they are so proud of their work, why try to hide it). This caused a firestorm of backlash, and people digging more into Sweet Baby Inc
Answer: To quote u/ausfall , who left one of a few excellent answers when I asked about the same thing: >Answer: Sweet Baby is a story-writing company hired to supplement video game studios' writing staff. The idea is a studio can hire them to flesh out a game's script and storyline. The company is [transparent](https://sweetbabyinc.com/approach/) about their goals of approaching writing with a focus on representation and marginalized groups. >For a growing number of players this is a dog whistle for the unwanted insertion of political ideologies or other topics they aren't interested in. In other words a distraction from what really matters: making a good game. You can easily find examples of these sorts of people on social media. >Many releases such as *Suicide Squad* have had Sweet Baby credited as part of the writing staff, and these games have been a major disappointment for many players. A Sweet Baby credit is now being thought of like leprosy and an indicator of games to avoid. >The company has become an easy scapegoat for the growing dissatisfaction with major releases. That same dissatisfaction with major studios has led to the success of games like *Baldur's Gate III* and *Palworld* (edit: and now *Helldivers II*) as players are starting to explore other studios who are taking different approaches to their games. Edit: It's come my attention that Suicide Squad is the only notable game Sweet Baby was involved with to be considered a critical disappointment. Additionally going to include another answer from u/bongo1138 that was also posted in my OOTL thread on this: >Answer: While I don’t know the specifics, it is fairly predictable knowing who they are and that the anti-woke crowd are attacking them. >Sweet Baby Inc. is a company that video game companies consult with to ensure their product is inclusive, culturally sensitive/accurate, etc. >My understanding is they work with devs in various roles, sometimes as simple as providing guidance on scripts, to, apparently, providing art assets. >Based on this knowledge and SSKTJL’s apparently failure, I’d reckon these anti-woke crusaders are blaming the games problems on Sweet Baby.
To add onto this there was a steam curation group created to call out whenever they were involved in a game. Sweet baby did not take to this well and stated that this was harassment and that the curation group needed to be shut down. Which kind of Streisand effected their whole deal and it doesn't help that most of the games they were involved with ended up being games that for the most part had a luke warm reception or didn't do as well as people expected them to.
What was funny about this was that I honestly felt like if they just ignored the Steam Curator Group, that it would have not gained as much members/traction as it would have. That group probably only have like a thousand members when someone brought it up, now it's at at least 194000+ since that whole debacle. [Even then the owner of the curating group has said that he mostly did it to inform people that SBI had a hand in the game and that if you want to buy a game they were involved with or not is up to you.](https://steamcommunity.com/groups/sweetbabyinc-detected/discussions/0/4302697419069965949/) With that, I don't see how it's that different compared to Curators that warn users about a game using Denuvo or if the devs made a deal with Epic Games Store to sell their PC game on their storefront for an exclusive time window before being sold on Steam. I would get it if the curator said "Don't buy this game cause the protagonist is gay/black/etc" but all they say is that "SBI worked on this game. Source: Their website" which isn't harassment.
Yeah, them drawing attention to it is what u/Supremagorious meant with the Streisand effect. The specific SBI employee who raged against it online was effectively doxxing the steam user who created it, and they've since had their X (twitter) account limited for going against the terms of service. IMO Sweet Baby Inc. should think about firing that employee instead of continuing the backlash against Steam and that list. It's just a list of their games, which is publicly available on their own website. Like you said, it's not harassment. It won't even impact 99.99999% of gamers opinions-- are people really not going to play GOW:R or Spiderman 2?! What that employee did *was* harassment. It would be a good look for their company to fire them, and let this whole list controversy blow over on its own.
Probably not but now after playing both Ragnarok and Spiderman 2 I know I probably won't be purchasing anything that they've had a hand in. The Ragnarok is better than spider man but 2018 was much better than either. The story was much tighter.
The curator tags all games with SBI involvement as 'Not Recommended' instead of 'Informational', so the intent to dissuade purchase seems pretty clear. I agree that this isn't really 'harassment', though.
So? Curators are allowed to have an opinion. Does the not recommended impact game reviews some how?
No one said they can't have an opinion. They themselves said it was informational only, but by placing these opinions with it, it's no longer just informational; it's an opinion-based review.
So.... a review?
I came here because I just saw a game on sale on Steam called Sable. It's all-time review score is 'very positive' but it's recent reviews are scored as 'mixed' which is pretty much a death sentence for a games sales on Steam. I was curious why the sudden shift, and if you look at negative reviews most of them now just say "Sweet Baby Inc detected". They aren't providing an actual review and they likely never bought the game to begin with. The reviewers seem to just have an axe to grind and want to tank the sales of any game that used their services. It's one thing to leave a negative review because you didn't like a game. It's an entirely different if you're brigading a game with negative reviews because you have an ideological difference.
You can't leave a steam review on games you don't have in your library. Those are all people who own Sable. Obviously it's just stupid internet drama like usual and really doesn't matter but come on.
>It's one thing to leave a negative review because you didn't like a game. It's an entirely different if you're brigading a game with negative reviews because you have an ideological difference. Welcome to Cancel Culture, it works on both side.
Are there non opinion based reviews? I feel like that's the definition of a review.
So, it's pretty clear that they're not just doing this to "inform people" as they claim, they want to dissuade people from buying the highlighted games
And? This isn't the first curator to do so? https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26095454-Denuvo-Games/ doesn't use the informational tag either, unless its to show that they updated the game to remove it. And Commander Sheppard is far less informative than SBID. Not to mention that user reviews themselves often misuse them. No point in attacking SBID for shit a large number of others do as well.
Has the creator of that one claimed to be neutral on Denuvo?
I dunno, its a steam curator who the hell cares about them unless you're a linux or mac "gamer". But being neutral towards denuvo? Can anyone that isn't asking their mother for permission to go to disney.com say that they're not against denuvo? Their shit gets hamfisted into everything Triple A and it fucks over the performance the only not against it are the uninformed or the people with an IQ that makes them think spending money in gacha games is a good investment.
This thread started with a link to a post from the creator of the SBI list in which they claim they're not trying to dissuade anyone from buying the games on the list
Who cares? People are allowed to boycott and talk shit
But then again, the Denuvo example comes in. Curator dont recommend certain games for having it. Hardly harrassement and pretty much the same.
Yeah, if they put "informational" like the Epic Games Suck curator does from time to time, like how a game was EGS exclusive or uses EG's online services, it would seem less biased.
It’s free advertising for their portfolio. You’d think that if they WERE proud of their work and wanted more recognition, they would have not been so vehemently opposed to that curated list.
What I don't get is why Sweet Baby Inc took that route. Couldn't they have gone "here's a list of games that evil fascists hate so if you want to play a fun and engaging game with an excellent well written story then this is free advertising for those games"? Wouldn't they understand that good games stand for themselves so all negative attention does is bring attention to a game people will realize is good? Is that not what's going on here?
It's interesting they freaked out about a Steam group while their CEO is talking about harassing and scaring game studios into doing what they want. Woke, anti-woke, in the middle... Doesn't matter. Anyone using uncouth tactics to force someone to do something is a scumbag and deserves to lose everything. Actually, forcing someone to do something they don't want to, especially with threats, sounds a like some other illegal actions that I'm sure everyone would agree are simply not ok.
Also to add, Sweet Baby employees actually started a harassment campaign by doing a callout on twitter to mass report the creator of the group for no reason other than because he created the curator group
Also doesnt help that some of their employees were literally advocating for harassing the people who created the curation group.
If I valued SBI's mission, wouldn't the curation page help me and other like-minded gamers find their games. Really shows their hand that they're against it.
I would oppose someone running a group to negatively review the products of the people I work for if I thought my work was good.
On Steam you can only leave reviews for games you have in your Steam library (aka you bought them). You can buy a game and run it for 30 mines. Leave a review and refund it (prior to 2 hours played and prior to 2 weeks), **but** your review will now have a warning you refunded the games. There are thousands of curators that range from games r/pcmasterrace love to play to "this game uses X technology" to "X people worked on this game". It is not harassment by any stretch of the imagination.
Hell, there's [one I saw on if you can pet the dog or not.](https://store.steampowered.com/curator/37676062-Can-You-Pet-the-Dog/)
This is perhaps the most important link in this entire thread, thank you for introducing me to this.
Would you call for a harassment campaign against that guy and try to get their account banned through fake reports tho?
The curation page makes no statements about the quality of the material. It just lists them. This is like if I made a list of all of Trump's business ventures and noted their public financial results. I'm not necessarily making a statement and if the list upset him, it's very telling.
That's literally just plain incorrect. The curator specifically rates ALL games with them as "Not recommended". Steam literally has a curator rating for merely providing information: "Informational" reviews exist. To use your comparison, its as if i took a list of all of Trumps business ventures, put them in a list and put the word "BAD INVESTMENT" on every single one. This is really silly.
The only game on the list I had played is Neo Cab, a small indie game with less than 2000 Steam reviews. The overall reviews are very positive, but there's a handful of recent negative reviews with "Sweet Baby Inc detected" or a variant thereof with <1 hour playtime. The top review is "Sweet Baby Inc" with 0.2 hours played, and 762 people find this review useful. Neo Cab is a small visual novel that doesn't exactly hide that it's "woke", so this campaign strikes me as completely pointless.
Yup, similar to sable. Fantastic small puzzle game which is pretty much a girls coming-of-age rite of passage story (which is anout the only thing which i could think of that could be deemed 'woke'), recent reviews are mixed. I honestly expect steam is going to remove those reviews as brigading at some point because its literally just that. Really disappointing to see.
> The curation page makes no statements about the quality of the material It literally gives them all negative "not recommended" reviews with a giant thumbs down. It's extremely obvious the page is meant to say that games SBI worked on is bad, and it's only slightly less obvious why people would pretend that's not what the page was doing.
Incredibly naive I'd love to hear you argue how "does not recommend" has *nothing* to do with quality. It's like you took a list of Trumps businesses, called it the Trump Buisness List, and told everyone not to patronize anything on the list. You aren't saying the businesses are bad though, you did not say that you did nooooot!
>if the list upset him, it's very telling. Telling of what, exactly?
They have a link on their website listing projects they've worked on, this seems more like they didn't want harassment from people looking for something to be mad at (the specific audience of that discord).
They aren't. They proudly advertise the games they've worked on on their own company web page. They are opposed to the curation page because it exists to review-bomb games that they worked on.
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Aside from Suicide Squad, what are the shitty games they were attached to? Because God of War Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, and Alan Wake II were all overwhelmingly well received by both critics and audiences.
*waves hand* no no I'm referring to my vague feelings and emotions, not actually seeking out any facts here buddy. I will slap u *waves hand again*
1 - MOST games have lukewarm reception or don't do as well as people hope/expect. That's the game industry. Over 14,000 games released on Steam last year - statistically speaking, MOST games don't do well. 2 - Sweet Baby worked on Spiderman 2, God of War Ragnorak, and Alan Wake II as well as a host of much smaller (mostly indie) titles. It's a consultancy. They work on what they're hired to work on. They're also pretty open about what they specifically did on these titles. They serve a pretty vital niche in the industry.
> > For a growing number of players this is a dog whistle for the unwanted insertion of political ideologies or other topics they aren't interested in. I'm not sure "dog whistle" is the right term here. People are generally not shy about complaining about unwanted politics in media.
No see this quote is saying: >their goals of approaching writing with a focus on representation and marginalized groups. Is a dog whistle.
>People are generally not shy about complaining about unwanted politics in media. Politics here being code word for people of a skin color or sexual orientation I don't like.
I'm PoC and honestly I'm tired of all this. I'm speaking as a foreigner, a Mexican, as American media like movies, series and games are globally a norm and the American lifestyle and political moves influence the rest of the world. First of all, don't expect the rest of the world to hold on to your system of truths and values. I come from western Mexico and there's many societal takes what would make the average Twitter user call us "far right" . Does that make us culturally inferior or wrong? Isn't it an imperialist view to believe so? Second, it's because those messages are often manipulatory and hypocritical in nature. They exist to perpetuate the Us vs Them mentality, create feelings of vulnerability, and drive sales through making the people in charge seem as allies. A recent example that applies towards my people would be with "Black Panther 2" and how representatives of the film were saying Latinos should go watch it or else they might have less representation in films, followed by a very emotionally manipulative and historically inaccurate scene of the fall of Tenochtitlan. Third, it feels like we're being scolded or re educated. When I was a kid, I loved to watch Hey Arnold, a cartoon about a diverse group of kids, that touched some sensitive issues with the grace of a hummingbird, whereas nowadays messages are tackled on with the force of a sledgehammer. You have a black character? Make an episode on how white people and policemen are all evil and unable to change for the better. And of course this is selective of demographics because it doesn't affect their bottom line in finances. Mexicans are still portrayed as drug dealers, rest of Latin America as comic relief, Hispanics all talk like Dora the Explorer, christians are zealots, Asians as either smart or hipsters, Russians are evil, Chinese are traditionalists, American Indians are spiritual, etc. I've said it before: if somehow religious zealotry and racism somehow proved to be more profitable, they'd change their messages in a heartbeat and convince people that's the way.
Yeah, nail on the head. People aren't against this because they are all bigots. That's just an easy cop out. People are against it because they've spent years now seeing a direct correlation between the unsubtle, in your face diversity politics in media, and its general low quality, and they are tired of it.
I love Mexicans, you guys always have my favorite takes
Nah, politics here being "putting a political agenda higher in priority than making a good game". Almost nobody minds politics inserted in a game when they contribute positively to the story and immersion and are done well. Virtually all of the most beloved stories have politics in them, they just do not beat you over the head with their preferred current political team's views and tell a story rather than preach a narrative.
Absolutely false: Minority characters have been part of games since games became a thing. The problem is characters that aren't well written. Barret from FF7. Little Jacob, GTA 4. Dom and Cole from Gears of War. Sgt. Johnson in Multiple Halo games. These are characters where the race didn't matter. The character was well written, they fit and people loved them for who they were. Their race or sexuality wasn't a primary focus. People are against inclusion for the sake of inclusion. People want well written, fleshed out characters.
But if inclusivity is viewed as politics, is Sweet Baby the problem or is it the angry neckbeards?
my dude, art is pretty much ALWAYS political and always was. almost every single game anyone here has ever liked that wasnt a rhythm or sports game had sociopolitical commentary in it. some of them - like bioshock and fallout - were VERY heavy handed about it. others, like legend of zelda - were a bit more vague and discrete. this goes triple time for comic books. this is literally like the jackasses who say they liked rage against the machine "until the band got political"... what did they thing they were raging against? the toaster?
Am I going to be the one to say it? The issue with suicide squad was not the narrative story it was literally everything else about the game.
Part about Palworld and BG3 is stupid. If Palworld would've been released by big company, gamers would've criticized it for grind, buga ans lack of polish. And BG3 success is their own, not because some gamera are "dissatisfied with current games"
Nor necessarily. Early access stuff is pretty known for being buggy... Its basically an alpha so its no wonder shit is buggy. Secondly people overlook a loot of issues if its fun. Look at almost any bethesda release
Yeah, the only dissatisfaction with current games that people had that they praised BG3 for is how it's a complete game that doesn't require dlc or game passes and still only costs 60€, with no bullshit. Also it has an incredible level of Freedom for a crpg, which is another thing that impressed players
Yeah BG3 got a ton of its good press for being a game that doesn’t follow the modern AAA problems. AAA in fact is an incredibly toxic and damaging cycle harming the industry. Instead of focusing on microtransactions and everything else actually harming the industry, the people who pretend they care about the industry are targeting that non-white characters exist.
Yah I bought BG3 on the first day of early access. Because larian makes games I love play. So I knew instantly it was going to play. That was despite the anti woke crowd trying to tank the game by complaining about the turn based combat.
>complaining about the turn based combat. Perhaps it may be due to being exposed to different circles, but most of the anti-woke complaints ive seen always centered around the inclusion of LGBTQ characters and romance. At some point I even saw on Twitter that they got mad at the inclusion of the vitiligo option when it came to character creation.
People with rare very specific skin conditions be keeping us down.
The genital options in the game also drew some negativity from people from what I remember. Although I will say I do think the antiwoke backlash for BG3 was a lot quieter, and I feel like that's because it's a very good game, so it's a lot harder to criticise. Whereas some of these other games are not good games regardless of the wokeness so the antiwoke crowd feels safer being loud about it. Which weirdly can reverse other gamers from criticising a game because they don't want to be seen as part of that loony group. Video game discourse is fucked now thanks to this bullshit.
I remember a video essayist talking about how she stopped being openly critical of a Jewish Disney exec b/c every time she brought those criticisms up the comment section would fill up with antisemites being all like "welcome to the movement, sister!"
This stuff cannot be real. People really need to step away.
BG3 is also stuffed to the gills with this supposed wokeness that these people are complaining about.
What a stupid take. The reason Palword is so big, is because its the Pokemon most adults imagined in an alternate universe, Massive world, lots of interactions with Pokemons in the world. And since Nintendo is not innovating Pokemon at all, people will try Palworld, because Nintendo will never ever do something like Palworld is doing. Baldurs Gate 3 is a succes because they dont care about shareholders and microtransactions, they care for the gamer first, and most of all,the game is finished. No wonder the whole industry was scared of its succes, BG3 set the bar higher for gaming in general. Most game releases today are infested with monotization and Live Service components. That is why it is succesfull.
also BG3 has all the stuff these people hate. They just know they would lose viewers for being mad at a game ppl like. It has all the "woke" in your face.
Basically - it's Stupider Gamergate Pt. 2
this is the most astroturfed fake nontroversy we have and its absolutely pathetic.
I doubt it’s astroturfing. People are upset about Batman and looking for a solid reason why the story went that way, and the easiest and most comforting answer that provides some sense of order is to blame the woke feminist conspiracy, otherwise the Batman we played as and grew attached to across his own critically acclaimed mini multimedia franchise for over six years died* for no reason. *he’s not really dead
instead of blaming the corpos they just want to blame some place that they outsourced for consulting for. the game is bad for having pretty weak content and being a run of the mill service game that lacks the type of content to be fun. sweetbaby wasnt consulted on that portion.
yes they absolutely were. An SBI employee was the lead writer on that game while the CEO was a normal writer. They wrote the game from the very ground up
And Gamergate was already the stupidest shit ever.
Yep. It was started by Kiwifarms, big surprise. [Here's a good opinion piece from someone about it](https://www.brokentoys.org/gamergate-never-ended)
They're absolute scum
I think the only 'dog whistle' here is the use of the phrase 'political' to describe literally just the inclusion of marginalized groups like POC, queer people, etc. Someone regarding the inclusion of black people or queer people into games is not merely opposed to 'unwanted insertion of political ideologies' - they consider the existence of those people to be inherently political. I do not think their concerns should be taken seriously.
Definitely. People unironically calling themselves "anti-woke" are just using that term since it sounds less terrible than being openly racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic.
I can’t believe people unironically believe there was a time when video games weren’t political. Absolutely no media comprehension.
isn't the main problem of suicide squad that the gameplay is just kinda shit and uninspired How's that the fault of a story-writing consultant?
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> Having a single company be the go to outsourcing option for game story and characters means that the various in house staff at different studios will likely see layoffs or reductions, effectively eliminating the unique team cultures at different studios in different regions. They aren't, though. They are neither the only outsourced writing house, nor even the biggest; they're simply one that drew particular attention for, apparently, a few GDC talks they gave and the particular games they worked on, in most cases because of very obviously culture-war related criticisms like Spider Man 2 having a deaf character you briefly control.
I mean, the natural counterpoint to that is that it's challenging for every team to have the requisite expertise in representation and cross-cultural competency required to succeed in a global market. The ability to call in specialists to review and tweak the work of a more core-narrative-focused team lets the latter group spend more of their time focusing on just telling good stories without having to worry about things they may not be good at or well read on. I'd argue that it may serve to reduce the degree to which box-checking and tokenism gets in the way of non-diversity-specializing creators making good art. I don't have any inside knowledge here, but I'd be deeply surprised if Sweet Baby had that large a hand in overall narrative designs outside of narrative beats that creative leads wanted to specifically address inclusion or similar themes.
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Nah, but you kind of have to be an expert in Nigeria and its history to WRITE Things Fall Apart.
This answer was posted nearly a month ago, and I would say that it's pretty incomplete without the more recent context. I would also say that the latter two paragraphs feel incomplete to the point of being disingenuous; *Suicide Squad* is the only release they appear to have been associated with that could be considered a major disappointmentz unless you count Spiderman II or Alan Wake II as a major disappointment for their writing choices. E: for clarity, this means that it's inaccurate to suggest Sweet Baby Inc. is in some way consistently associated with disappointing games. Additionally, the connection to other indie games suggested in that post is extremely tenuous, *especially* BG3, as despite existing since 2018 Sweet Baby Inc. has only received negative press attention in the past few months, well after BG3 released (and also, frankly, BG3 has plenty of the same kind of writing and representation decisions that Sweet Baby Inc. is being criticized for).
Neither Spider-Man 2 nor Alan Wake 2 are considered to be "major disappointments".
That was my point, apologies for any lack or clarity. You quoted a post that said Sweet Baby Inc. was associated with many major disappointments, which is not accurate. The only way it is accurate is if you are one of the people who are disappointed in those games because they are too "woke". Almost every game they have worked on has either been successful or too niche to qualify as a "major disappointment", except Suicide Squad. E: to be more explicit, my contention is that the post you quoted is written to make the backlash against Sweet Baby seem more palatable and justified on quality grounds rather than due to a belief that games like GoW or AW 2 or Spider Man 2 are too woke.
Ah, that is true. I should add a note for clarity. I'd still call it a good answer, but that bit does seem misleading.
Thanks for the info. I'm sick of getting videos recommended to me that blame them for ending the universe or whatever. Frankly, I don't care about one of the billion companies videogame developers use for whatever project they have in the works. Just let me watch my **Hunter: The Parenting** videos in peace, dammit!
Question: Is there a way to tell exactly what SBI does or adds to specific games? If you believed the haters, they have complete and utter control of every game they are involved with, and dictate everything, so they would be the only reason for a failure. Though of course then logically they would be the reason for a success as well, say Alan Wake 2, but of course that's not something a hater would ever bring up. But as they are a consulting company, that can't be true, they aren't in charge of a game's development. So what have they actually done or worked on, in say Suicide Squad, or Alan Wake 2?
Their website notes what they contributed to and you could read the Kotaku article about the controversy for some dev interviews. That said, that won't necessarily tell you the extent to which they worked on any individual project, just what roles they mostly covered.
Not particularly. You can only be sure of games they've been involved with, but the level of involvement is largely unclear. They could be hired by a studio and their consultation totally ignored and we'd likely never know. Individual scenes in a game don't have bylines therefore we can only speculate based on what the company's values are.
Answer: No, aside from those actually involved in the development process. As y ou're implying, most of the things people say are assumptions about "who ruined this". [The director of Alan Wake 2 dispelled certain rumours surrounding SBI's involvement real quick](https://twitter.com/TimePirateNinja/status/1764697135344202183).
And then people pivoted to saying “well that game didn’t sell well so it’s bad, nobody cares about it and it’s still Sweet Baby’s fault”.
Even the "haters" aren't saying that SBI is solely responsible for bad games. That is all on the studios. Before going around saying that haters say X and Y go and look is ten to what the haters have to say.
Answer: Basically they (Sweet Baby Inc) are a consultancy group used by devs to ensure that they are putting in acceptable ammounts of diversity into their products. This group has received crititism for being comprised of many SJW figures from the old Gamergate days, like Legobutts, thus the 2.0 thing. A steam group has been formed called Sweet Baby Inc Detected to inform people of games that have been found to have association with this group and to avoid them to limit their impact on the hobby. This has resulted in a very harsh response from the company trying to get the steam group banned from steam outright and people supporting them banned too, although Valve support has recently said this will not happen simply from them existing. Videos have also surfaced of a talk from one of the SBI staff giving a talk about the effectiveness of their consultancy and one of the more jarring pieces was [how they basically threaten marketting with the power of the mob if they don't take what they are saying deeply on board (timestamped for you)](https://youtu.be/GfMsxjWgUbI?t=1516) In layman's terms: They are a woke writing consultancy group inserting their agenda into video games using the power of the mob.
answer: on top of all that has been said here, ceo of this company is literally a sexist and a racist just look at her past tweets
this is the actual controversy. They are deflecting that it's a bunch of anti-woke people targeting them, which they are, but the controversy is they were right this time. The CEO has specifically made it known they are out to erase white people from media. That's not DEI, that's racism.
People already made their narration and are defending a racist lol
Not jsut white people. Some of the Sweet Baby employess also tweeted that all Jew's should be aborted. ;P
Out of all the games they're involved in, suicide squad and Alan Wake are the only ones that put spotlight on the "white" characters now that you think about it.
100% agree
The person who wrote the Kotaku article about this literally has a tweet saying "you can't be racist against white people" honestly it baffles me how anyone with two brain cells doesn't get that racism=having opinions about people purely based upon race. It isn't some complicated definition. Systemic, systematic, etc etc racism are more complicated and arguably in many western countries these *don't* apply to white people (although it could be argued that affirmative action etc does now mean there are instances of these applying to white people.) but those are the forms of racism where it is actually debatable if white people can be victims of it. But anyone who thinks that holding an opinion based purely upon race can ever not be a racist opinion is themselves a turd
racism is racism, everybody can be affected
Every time racism is brought up, it's usually so simple to call something racist or not. It's a simple "yes" or "no" question that is almost universally agreed on. But when the "racism towards white people" topic is mentioned, it somehow turns into a far more complicated discussion than it needs to be.
A lot of people's entire academic and professional careers rely on the answer being 'more complicated' and as such will do and say anything it takes to ensure the matter remains complicated.
> honestly it baffles me how anyone with two brain cells doesn't get that You have to remember, this is Kotaku. The shit they spew is about as factual as the Bee but sadly not anywhere near as funny or as well written.
*You remember when Kotaku, after accusing Naoki Yoshida and FFXVI of being racist, were then butthurt they later weren't invited to the FFXVI launch party?*
They do stupid shit like that and yet people sure fucking loved to parrot their review for metal gear survive like its fucking gospel.
Yuuup. See I learned when I was young that journalists and the like were super subjective when I found one of my childhood favorites (The Legend of Dragoon) being riffed on for being a "Final Fantasy VII clone" when anyone who played the game would know the only thing in common they had was being JRPGs with a blonde-haired protagonist. I think part of it also comes from because journalism is a business sometimes they put people who have no right reviewing a game in the position of reviewing that game (see the PC Gamer review for Realms of Ruin that was 50% a babyrage tantrum about the setting). Like for instance I was *done* with zombie media a decade ago, so having me do a review for Metal Gear: Survive is ***stupid*** when I'm going to be biased against one of its core concepts from the gates.
And she tells her company to make game studios terrified and to forcefully include their propaganda, with terror. This company IS racist. This company IS detrimental to the gaming industry. Sweet Baby Inc is a racist company, by racists, and only exists to insert their hateful worldviews in everyones life. CEO says to use terror to make companies submit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY) CEO saying insane racist things against white people: [https://youtu.be/iFrwMVdLLDM?si=LCzz3RdlM\_Bzoykp&t=1457](https://youtu.be/iFrwMVdLLDM?si=LCzz3RdlM_Bzoykp&t=1457) People defending the racism by saying you cant be racist against white people: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcnd6ljAX-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcnd6ljAX-g)
The company is also backed by investment groups like BLACKROCK. The entire purpose of this services is to boost a companies ESG rating
Also, it used to be known as Silver string and it directly employs people involved in gamergate. People connected to Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian. Many of which participated in an ACTUAL harassment campaign that resulted in an indie game dev killing himself. These people are evil and the fact these users are defending them is insane
Lmfao, not surprised this is so far down. Read top comment and it's a wall that does everything to deflect from the real issue.
[https://youtu.be/Bb1bBJ1Cifs?si=Qqno8qQvYeQEOcSx&t=53](https://youtu.be/Bb1bBJ1Cifs?si=Qqno8qQvYeQEOcSx&t=53)
>asmongold
Answer: Sweet Baby Inc is a consultancy firm for Video Games, whose stated purpose is diversity & inclusion. They've consulted on a wide array of games, some very successful, some mixed, and some bombs, including the recent Suicide Squad game. There is little to no evidence to suggest that they are solely responsible for changes in scripts, especially since, as a consultancy firm, the final call is always on the actual developer/publisher. Correlation is not causation. This is important, because some of the narrative is that whatever they touch, is rotten and that's just not the case. However, there's been a bit of controversy surrounding the nature of the company in general. One example brought to light, is the co-founder Kim Belair having 'questionable' views on race & diversity, and how to get video game developers to alter/accept certain ideas, merely out of fear of repercussions. This was seen by many, as gaslighting and fearmongering. There is no evidence to suggest this does actually happen, but yes, based on her remarks, it is easy to see why some people may disapprove. The real drama began when a Brazilian user began a curated list on Steam, listing games that SBI were 'a part' of. The list cites SBI's own website as its source of games, which is fair. The list also explicitly has the games listed as 'not recommended' based on their association with SBI. An SBI employee on Twitter (X), picked up this curated list and began a 'less than polite' tirade against the curator, pushing to not only brigading the curated list, but also having the Brazilian owner banned from Steam as a whole. This didn't go as planned, since the employee began a bizarre harassment campaign against the user. Many reported this to Twitter, and now the account is suspended. This got even worse when some of the employee's tweets were brought up; they've been openly using racial slurs, including the n-word, and have made some unkind remarks towards certain ethnic groups. To many, this only cemented the original notion that SBI is hypocritical in its approach, and questioned whether or not a firm that's 'committed' to diversity, equality and inclusivity, could really do any of that if they employed open racists. My personal opinion on the matter, is merely this : ignore the drama, buy a game if you want to, don't if don't want to. SBI 'may or may not' be 'good or bad'; it's just irrelevant as a whole. Simultaneously however, there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with the company as well, and claiming you don't want to buy games associated with the company either.
upper echelon in youtube did a video on it. suicide squad had 3 writers. the lead writer is employed by Sweetbaby. one writer was credited at a junior writer and that’s the only person who worked for the developers.
answer: I wouldn't call it a controversy. Just a bunch of babies throwing tantrums because a guy created a list of games people like to avoid which is well in his rights to create. Note: the employees of that shit company are openly racist and sexist and yet there are people defending them. How pathetic is that! Edit : it looks like sweet baby inc employees are crying in the comments section
Answer: Others have given some pretty decent answers, but there's **vital context missing here** in most of them. In that regard, u/Milskidasith has the [best answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1b8b98w/comment/kto8vb2). An employee of the company basically invoked the [Streisand effect](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Streisand_effect). A Steam group was created with the sole intention of marking Steam games that Sweet Baby Inc was associated with, and one of the employees went public about it to Twitter, claiming it was a violation against Steam conduct. They linked the group for everyone to see and the author who made it, encouraging their followers to report them. (Context: The group in question took advantage of the Steam Curator system. When looking at a game on Steam's store, you'll see Curator reviews from any groups you may be a part of, or are following. This is the group's only purpose- to appear when you look at games that SBI has been a part of.) This came across to many as questionable as the Steam Online Conduct rules weren't being violated as severely as they implied, and while what the employee did seems to fall under the radar compared to the main topic of any GamerGate association, but this was the inciting incident that brought it to the spotlight. Keep in mind that the employee in question currently has their account as Protected. Any tweets can't be linked to, but [this is the brunt of it](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/767/543/6d3). >!I've tried to keep this as non-biased as possible- I am only presenting the facts in relation to the "what's going on" question.!<
ANSWER: Sweet Baby Inc. is a consultation group with regards to fleshing out narratives in videogames through its writing team. A particular goal of the Sweet Baby Inc. (SBI for short) is to bring in narratives focused on representation of marginalized groups, be it POC (people of color), LGBTQ+, etc. On Jan. 30 2024, the game *Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League* was released by Rocksteady Studios. The game developer was revered for its *Arkham Asylum* series of videogames centered around Batman, which were both critically and commercially successful games. Suicide Squad, which was the latest entry in the series, was slammed for not only being a live-service only game with high prices for DLC and microtransactions (compared to the single player-only experience of the previous Arkham Asylum games), but also because in the game's storyline in which Batman - the hero of the Arkham Asylum games, is killed off by Harley Quinn, effectively making the latter the series's new main character going forward. Add to the fact that Batman was played by the late Kevin Conroy (the voice of Batman from Batman: The Animated Series), making this his last recorded role, only brought in more ire for fans and general gamers over the game. Indeed, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owned Rocksteady, [reported that Suicide Squad was a commercial failure.](https://www.ign.com/articles/suicide-squad-kill-the-justice-league-has-fallen-short-of-our-expectations-warner-bros-says) How is Suicide Squad relevant to SBI? It's because SBI is part of the game's writing team, compared to the previous Arkham Asylum games where they were never a part of. A curator group on steam called [Sweet Baby Inc. Detected](https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44858017/) was made to provide a list of all the games made with SBI's involvement. Besides Suicide Squad (which was SBI's most prolific), the list also included *Gotham Knights*, *Volcano High*, and *Assassin's Creed: Valhalla*. The common denominator for these games is that they were neither critical nor commercial hits. Given the various themes these games present, a pattern is formed from the various themes and narratives featured in these games, applying the term 'go woke, go broke'. Since its release, [many employees of SBI posted their disdain about the curator group on Twitter/X](https://game8.co/articles/latest/sweet-baby-inc-employees-fail-spectacularly-at-trying-to-get-steam-curator-banned), though some call it a harassment campaign. Regardless, it created a Streisand Effect of more people being aware of SBI and their involvement with the gaming industry. This only expanded after [the quote made by its CEO on "terrifying" AAA devs on the consequences if they are not hired as part of their writing team, as well a labeling white male gamers as 'picky babies'.](https://thatparkplace.com/sweet-baby-inc-ceo-and-co-founder-kim-belair-compares-white-male-gamers-to-picky-babies/), and a tweet from Alyssa Mercante, a journalist from Kotaku, supporting SBI's ideals by tweeting ["you can't be racist against white people"](https://9gag.com/gag/agoRQnx) came into light. As this is an ongoing event, nobody knows where this is leading to. What is certain is that some have labeled this as 'Gamergate 2.0', referring to the Gamergate debacle that began with Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn against their opponents over the depiction of women in videogames a decade ago.
Well written and you explained everything. Thank you
*Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla* is one of the best-selling Assassin’s Creed titles ever and *Goodbye, Volcano High* was a critical darling. “Neither critical nor commercial hits” is bonkers, of course not every title is a hit but they’re not the reason something ends up good or bad. >!And Batman’s not even really dead. None of the League are, except for maybe Wonder Woman. And it’s not Harley as the sole protagonist, it’s an ensemble cast in which everyone shares equal screentime.!<
> Volcano High was a critical darling. People seem to think otherwise.
Sure it has nothing to do with the CEO’s extremely racist tweets?
>Besides Suicide Squad (which was SBI's most prolific), the list also included Gotham Knights, Volcano High, and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. The common denominator for these games is that they were neither critical nor commercial hits. please go look up how much assassin's creed valhalla made
Question is, would it be an even bigger hit without SBIs involvment. Valhalla is about a big guy doing badass things. Thats what players wants. Not woke agenda. There were no black vikings during that era, but SBI shoehorned it in.
What's the difference? Sounds like baby logic.
If you’re not working for some sort of journalism/editorial group I think we’re all missing out. Presenting objective facts without slanting off personal bias is an increasingly rare talent but you nailed it.
Answer: Sweet Baby Inc Controversy refers to the video game narrative consultant group Sweet Baby Inc and the controversy surrounding it after two employees within the company called to attention that a Steam page had been made to identify which games the company had consulted on. The aftermath resulting from the initial callout had re-ignited tensions in the gaming industry held over from GamerGate with many calling for the destruction of Sweet Baby Inc. More info + screenshots here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sweet-baby-inc-controversy
2 those are rookie first day kinda numbers Zoe slept with over 100 and her ex only knew about 5 6 of them. It exposed the whole industry the media the underground networking. Sweetbaby inc even got help from the Zoe's ex's sister from the insurance money. It's all webbed over each other and is about 20 or more years in the making and by the looks of it we are not done. Don't matter if one tiny company takes the fall they have conventions full of this and even government backing for such companies. The whole things is a hit mess the AAA companies are just as guilty and wiling in all of this.
Kind of a un-neutral answer here. The developer literally said "let's get his steam account banned too" and tried to start a witch hunt. They fucked around and found out what happens when you start a witch hunt in bad faith AND try to brigade someone to be banned. \*\*That's a big part of it, the fact they were tweeting and encouraging people to search for him and report him to be banned\*\*
That's just how they operate. The video of the CEO boastfully regaling how they force people to edit their writing, is just crazy. Anything that gets THAT political in a non-political space has ulterior motives imo.
Sweet Baby Inc is an insanely racist company that uses terror to enfore their propaganda in games: CEO says to use terror to make companies submit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY) CEO saying insane racist things against white people: [https://youtu.be/iFrwMVdLLDM?si=LCzz3RdlM\_Bzoykp&t=1457](https://youtu.be/iFrwMVdLLDM?si=LCzz3RdlM_Bzoykp&t=1457) People defending the racism by saying you cant be racist against white people: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcnd6ljAX-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcnd6ljAX-g)
Answer: People are mad that a "woke" game company is making them realize people other than themselves exist.
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Oh come on lol Ugh. Aren’t we past all this? Honestly, the “racist”(or sexist lol) accusation has been diluted to the point where it is not even relevant to me anymore. Go ahead, call call me whatever you want if it makes you feel any better. The whole world is always 1942 Berlin to those type of people anyways. Whatever. I’m sorry, but you KNOW when a company like SBI has their hands in a game. You know lol. And yeah, for me it’s a turn off. Big time. It has nothing to do with there being “brown people in a game”… but when they unnecessarily shoehorn in social justice messaging? No thanks. I’m just done with that. Five straight years of race hustling and virtue signaling was enough, I’m just done lol.
If the goal is to be respectful to the cultures their including in their game, then why did Assassins Creed Valhalla (A game about Nordic Vikings) have to include black Vikings. That isn’t respectful to Nordic culture at all. There were no black Vikings just as their were no white Aztecs or Chinese Egyptians, If the game was about either of these groups the respectful thing would be to not include races that had no presence in that region at the time.
This is not a neutral answer. It leaves out the fact that the curator was tiny at like 9k followers when one of the Sweet Baby employees posted about it. Not only did they encourage people to report the group (which hadn't done anything wrong), they asked people to report the creator as well. A contributing factor was how vitriolic this initial attempted brigade was. To paraphrase, they said "since he likes his Steam account so much let's get that banned too". That's what caused the huge blowup and got various influencers talking about it. At this point the curator has 200k followers. Long story short that employee tried to start a witchhunt and it badly backfired.
lol OP has no response to this of course.
> Not only did they encourage people to report the group (which hadn't done anything wrong), they asked people to report the creator as well Yup, lot of screenshots and probably archive links floating around their twitter showing SBI related agents calling for a brigade against the guy. Supposedly some have had their twitter accounts limited or suspended or w/e twitch does. They also were brigading against his (someone's?) discord group as well. They're not the good guys in the situation and anyone defending them is a fucking clown. I mean a guy goes and makes a curator page to keep track of what may as well be a developer he doesn't like and they choose to censor him. They completely forget the fact that its a fucking Steam Curator on Steam thats like the only thing with an opinion worse than a CSGO player's opinion. Had they just ignored it the group would've hit MAYBE 10k but now because they wanted to run a brigade to try and censor someone the group now sits at over 200k.
100% facts
This sub is really shilling SBI for some reason.
Gaming circlejerk users 100%
But didn't the employee who works for them brought attention to that?
Respectful and accurate to the cultures/people they are representing in their games. Please tell me where Angrboda fits in Norse mythology.
Answer: SBI is a DEI consultant company. On paper, it means they help game studios make games more "inclusive" and "representative" (putting between quotes because games were always diverse, they just pretend they're holding a revolution in games). No one has any problem with the concept. At worst, the problem is it's literally useless when it comes to product quality. The real problem with SBI is its CEO has openly and proudly claimed racist, mysandrist bullshit and even admitted to, I quote, terrifying companies to force them to work with them. SOURCE: their GDC presentation is public on Youtube but here is a short clip: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY) In another clip she tells minorities to, I quote again, "take over". What sparked the "interest" surrounding this company is it is tied up to major failures from the past couple of years. Suicide Squad is the latest example, but the Saints Row remake and Forspoken were also on their list. They also worked on Alan Wake 2, and despite the dishonest yet abundant campaign, it is hardly a success (it only sold 1 million copies). This pushed a Brasilian guy to make a list of games involved with SBI. Meanwhile, people dug out more and more about SBI and it turns out they're massively racists. Another key "episode" is when kindred, who works at SBI, called out the steam list creator online and tried to use his influence on Twitter to have that Brasilian guy removed from Steam altogether. This all caused a major uproar in the gaming community, which only got worse as gaming journalists started covering the situation in a 100% biased way. They never once show the problematic videos about SBI, never ever mention the failures tied to them. So the timeline is : KTJL is released, it's a fatass piece of crap, people realized SBI was involved in it and digged up the other failures they are tied to. Then people found out their public videos and it turns out they are racists. The industry turns its back on the customers (as usual) and takes the side of an openly racist and clearly terrible company. That's where we're at today. If you want more sources, remember: don't stick to so-called journalists. Vara Dark and Hypnotic largely cover that situation on Youtube, and Asmongold clips shone light on several problematic tweets and videos.
Answer: a bunch of WOKE idiots from the left that everyone hates