2 employees went to twitter to harass a steam group admin for listing the games Sweet Baby Inc. wrote for/were consulted with.
Hi fellow Gamers Lemmings.
This thread was bought to our attention as possibly breaking rule 2 (No Bigotry/Harassement).
First, some context. The article comme from a right leaning website, with mixed factuality and medium credibility.
This means the content of this article shouldn’t be taken as is and should be complemented from other, more neutral/factual websites.For now I didn’t find this story on any verifiable sources with such requirement.
On the other hand, the comments seem to be a lot more neutral than the OP link, and raise some interesting points. As such, I’ll keep this thread, but will keep it under close watch to keep the conversation civil.
Thank you for your understanding.
Dremor, c/games mod.
Safe bet. If the Sweet Baby employees never talked about this. The curation page and group would have lost traction early and remained in obscurity. Looks like nobody learns about the Streisand Effect anymore.
EDIT I’m still on the curation page and group side of this btw.
So sweet baby Inc (who I never knew of until now) felt attacked by a list on steam which collected titles they worked on (it didn’t say avoid apparently, just a list of titles they worked on with proof from their own media).
Kind of telling of the company that they saw this as an offense to them rather than as a tribute. If they thought their work was good they’d advertise this list themselves.
Also, way to dig a grave.
Collecting lists related to a disenfranchised group or the aid of a disenfranchised group is a pretty big red flag of the actor’s intentions, especially when that list gets passed around to corners of the internet that are well known to think the problem is not enough disenfranchisement.
4chan lost the right to complain about anything related to D&I in gaming and be treated as anything but subhuman slime after Gamergate.
Collecting lists related to a disenfranchised group
Didn’t know a consulting company was a disenfranchised group.
4chan lost the right to complain about anything related to D&I in gaming and be treated as anything but subhuman slime after Gamergate.
Amusingly, one of the people Quinn cheated on Gjoni with works for Sweet Baby, just to tie things together. The one that was involved in doxxing and trying to DDoS that crowdfunded game jam project thing that the Vivian James character was created for.
Fwiw, this is bigots harassing developers and then posting articles like this, avoiding all the details about their bigotry
This reads so weird.
The company is… just a consultation company? The kind of one you’re supposed to hire when working on a script including minorities et al to ensure you’re not accidentally getting something wrong or presenting it in a stereotypical or atypical way?
And for some reason they’re angry about someone listing games they’ve worked on, as if any kind of exposure would ever be bad for a consultation company that, by its very nature, usually works in the background and hence finds it a bit difficult to get exposure?
And at the same time, someone makes a Steam curator list because they’re somehow pissed some devs are doing something devs ought to do, hire a company specialized in character writing instead of letting someone less experienced do it?
Do people really, in 2024, not have any bigger issues so they 're busty with this shit?!
(edit)
Ah, it’s a very biased “article” that clearly just wants to riff on the consulting company further as if they’re responsible for games being bad, not the devs actually making the games. I also frequently blame the visual marketing ad designer for the graphics driver crashes, aye.Because Sweet Baby Inc is known for forcing a narrative and tokens into the writing, for the sake of diversity on the cost of quality of the story and the characters. A lot of people don’t like that.
Now the issue is much bigger than that and I don’t like to involve myself with it much, as the controversy attracts a lot of truly bigot people, who also want to stop SBI. So one automatically gets shoved into that corner. And this is exactly what SBI is abusing to their advantage. No one can stop them from destroying good games in fear of getting burned on the stack.
I struggle to think of an otherwise good game they have “destroyed” by “forcing” a narrative or token characters.
That is to say, I don’t think I can point to a case where the game would have been otherwise good. Adding badly written characters to bad games does make them if anything marginally better (at least they’re consistent 😅), plus unless the devs completely lost control of their own project the consultation company would not actually implement the characters. They’d give you background stories, profiles, example interaction scenes where they took scenes and re-did them with their characters, or example lists of character archetypes to utilize this profile in.
The actual (bad) writing, (bad) characters and (bad) narrative are still up to the devs to (badly) add.
(edit)
I mean just going by their official project list, I can only personally mark out Suicide Squad, BattleShapers and Sable as bad, and none of these games needed their inclusionism - such as it is, you could argue Suicide Squad makes a mockery of it anyways - to be terrible games, they were plenty able of being that on their own. Plus again, it’s the devs doing that, not the consulting company.One of the examples I’ve seen of SBI “forcing inclusivity” was making Saga in Alan Wake 2 black. I’m not familiar enough with SBI’s work to do make a real judgement, but if this is one of the examples being used to say that SBI is making games worse, then the curator list is dumb.
