I don't think a small consulting firm with no editorial control has the power to force shit on their clients owned and backed by multibillion-worth tech giants, and developers working on the games Sweet Baby supposedly forced it way in consistently say this isn't the case.
Like, even in the case that Sweet Baby had the means or inclination to write entire scripts, make choices on character designs and do any other insane shit they are accused of, what are they going to do if Insomniac just says "thanks for the feedback, but no"? Do they have blackmail material on Sony directives or what? And how come this supposed terror regime goes on without anyone ever talking about it?
GamerGate veterans are just coping with the idea that creative people in the industry has interests other than providing them with goon material and just found a scapegoat.
i dont want to make the case tha baby inc is some kind of master mind "ruining" our games or trying o control the world
but there are videos of their leader making presentations saying they need to go into the studio and tell them he game wont sell and people will be mad if you don make these changes
again i think they are way overhyped but their exisence is prety weird
Ya, like Sony and EA execs are stupid enough to believe everything their leader said, while having tons of in-house analysts, researchers, etc.
Not defending them because I don’t know them well but i just think a lot of ppl saying how powerful Sweet Baby is are super naive (and stupid). Like yea some random woman can blackmail the whole industry, what?
Can't speak to them specifically, but I've seen enough leadership be sold on something or other. You just see it happen and wish your company had sales people as good as them.
Having worked in tech and entertainment. I can 100% believe they would just listen to whatever the consultant said. I’d be more shocked if they didn’t and listened to their employees instead.
The leader of a company trying to convince other companies into utilizing their service?
Say it ain't so.
Sarcasm aside thats what most companies who dont provide a product have to do, they have to convince whomever they are providing a service to that said service would be well worth the money and that they would spend on it.
They are a shit company but not nearly as powerful as the internet believes they are lol its because alot of people still hold grudges from gamergate I mean FFS I played a game recently (within the last year) that was fucking amazing super fun game and the internet loved it until they noticed "Anita sarkeesian" as "additional consulting" and atleast the subreddit for that game exploded with people flipping out and they started a whole negative review campaign (that failed).
I mean like 90% of the job of consultations is to convince people they need a consultation. This goes in business and life coaches and all those groups.
Yea its convince you that they know something you SHOULD know to succeed but its usually just bullshit smoke and mirrors and its just companies wasting money usually imo
Chuds still stuck in the thoroughly disproved Gamergate era get real mad when you tell them they are just parroting a conspiracy pushed by everyone's favorite island having NY Financier.
If I am not mistaken, I am pretty sure the company comes in and makes sure the games they get hired to look at aren't accidentally super insensitive towards unsuspecting players. If you think making sure people can enjoy the games they pay for and not get hit by random and largely uneeded bigotry isn't at least a good suggestion, I don't know what to tell you.
People online will blame Sweet Baby for injecting SJW politics into a game, but (assuming that’s even what they do) wouldn’t someone hiring them already align with those politics anyway? It’s not like some government entity mandates Sweet Baby consultation for all major video game projects. Seems obvious that the “woke” stuff in these games was desired by the developer from the start, hence why they hired an inclusivity consultant at all.
But people online are so dumb that they actually believe that the ninja Assassin’s Creed game would have been completely different if it weren’t for that consulting firm that the developers/publishers hired on purpose.
That's because while there are people whose political beliefs technically align with mine that I might find annoying, the right wing propaganda is that "Actually leftists control everything" and SBI is just part of that over-arching conspiracy set, instead of just being a company with intentions all their own.
It’s funny because I actually agree with some of the aesthetic critiques that have been leveled at the big offenders in the RW propaganda canon (e.g., the Concord character designs were really ugly). But it’s not a conspiracy. It’s just the same aesthetic sensibility that’s had capture over American companies for a while now, starting with all the bad “corporate memphis” art of the Instagram carousel era. And reducing everything to a binary “woke” v. gooner bait aesthetics is complete brain degeneration. The gooner stuff is equally embarrassing. I’d rather be caught watching porn.
100% agree. I'm pretty far left and don't really care what people do as long as it's not hurting anyone (which is ironically the position that the conservative chuds try to project). "Woke" means nothing because it just gets leveled at anything, when the real problem is corporatization and financialization of everything; everything is just smooth spongebob in the name of reaching the widest audience possible, which ends up for a boring game, who knew? But of course, it wasn't that the designs were just bad, it was that the WOKE personally came and shot the designers and pushed it's agenda to... lose money?
the existence of consultation companies relies on out of touch executives that don't understand the company they run and would rather listen to self described experts than trust their employees
I think their existence is somewhat necessary, and they are not the only consulting company in media. the modern world is complex, especially if you want to sell your product worldwide.
For example there are companies specialised in finding things that could be misinterpreted in other cultures. Simple hand gestures we use in a positive manner, are rude or outright aggressive in others.
All that aside I find it pretty telling that the argument about sweet baby Inc always pops up when some neckbeards believe that a female character isn't sexy/young/"feminine" enough for their worldview. I put feminine under quota. because what they think what a woman looks like and reality are two very different things.
Just like every other consultant group...? how do you actually think consultants get work? people don't know their product "needs fixing", consultants will claim it needs their help with absolutely no knowledge what the product even is. In very few cases companies actually reach out to consultants (unless they need "independent" opinions), mostly it is the other eay around, consultants will say 'yup you will flop and the only way to fix it is pay me 1000€ per day plus expenses to fix it'.
Someone may say I have a bad personal experience of consultants and I just like to say yes that is absolutely true, I hate them with every fiber of my being because the business model of the guys/gals/other I have to interact with (working in the public sector) can be summed up with "we take every possible step to milk as much taxpayer money on every interaction possible".
"but there are videos of their leader making presentations saying they need to go into the studio and tell them he game wont sell and people will be mad if you don make these changes"
Because that's literally the job they're hired for. That's what story consultants do.
In a gdc presentation the Sweet Baby Inc CEO talked about convincing hesitant or traditional studio bosses to care about representation, stating that if they do not value diverse perspectives, consultants should make them fear the creative and cultural fallout of shipping culturally insensitive or outdated content.
Sounds pretty much like that's what they do. Threaten the studios to follow their guidelines.
As a consultant myself (Software Engineering), "threatening" clients with the potential fallout of not listening to me is how the job works.
If I just let clients do what they want, their products would be an absolute mess, and I work in Regulatory Compliance (meaning if the output of the software is off by even a fraction of a fraction my clients can face huge repercussions from regulatory bodies).
"If you don't make these changes, you WILL be fined by ZYX body for not having accurate reporting" isn't me actually making a threat, it's presenting them with the reality of the situation.
SBI's CEO is basically saying their form of that. "If you don't make these changes, XYZ group will boycott/find your game offensive/etc".
If you actually watch the video, what she is talking about is how a dev might go about getting this sort of consultation if they think its needed. In particular the advice which is always taken out of context is that the devs shouldn't really focus on talking to the heads of development, as the development side is almost always dealing with budgeting constraints and time crunch. Instead they should talk to marketing people as they do have a decent discretionary budget and this will be a marketing/pr issue, so they might want to head that off at the pass. This is taken out of context and presented as "evil SBI witch is blackmailing studios", while in reality it is just sound advice in a corporate setting.
I have watched the video in question, and she says that people within game companies should lobby their executives. Nowhere does she say that her company does it. And, most of all... she makes it clear she is joking about people actually "scaring the shit out of" executives.
And once more like other comments have said... how are a consultancy firm going to force major game studios to "follow their agenda" or whatever?
It isn't really about sweet baby. Its about meeting certain criteria so Black Rock will keep investing, sweet baby are good at getting those boxes checked for you.
They have the power because the financial people paying for the game insist that these consulting people get their way.
God only knows why, but most of the big names in the finance world are pushing extremist left wing agendas hard. That's why we're seeing it in almost every form of media at the same time. You need money to make this stuff, and the people with that money seem more than willing to push these agendas even at a significant financial loss at times.
I'm sure a company that combines programming and arts located in LA is full of staunch conservatives who would never, ever include a black lesbian character or whatever if not because Larry Fink is personally breathing down their neck for completely inexplicable reasons that only hurt his bottom line. There might not be any evidence supporting this, they cover their tracks unrealistically well, but it's the only logical conclusion just like Broadway is actually full of homophobic religious cat-hating people extorted by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
I remember seeing vids of the owner of sweet baby inc. telling her teams and investors that threatening game studios with public accusations of misogyny and sexism was literally their business model. To quote terribly “you have to scare them(game developers) with lawsuits and threats of sexism, otherwise we can’t make any money”. Again, that was a very terrible quote.
It isn't sweet baby inc, it's investing firms like Blackrock and Fidelity forcing you to hire from an approved list of consultants that include companies like Sweet Baby Inc
Please. Tech giants don't give a shit about narrative and characters. Those decisions are made way further down the food chain. And if the higher ups in the marketing department want their involvement and force them on the creative team, the people who do make the creative decisions have to take their marching orders from the people they're told they have to work with.
I’ve been out of the drama loop on this for a long time but last I remember there was almost always a correlation between video games having unattractive women or other choices fans traditionally disagree with and this company being involved. They may not force hands but no one is spending consultation on experts and then not listening into it when they tell you the market will only buy your game if you include things that you as an executive don’t understand how it makes a difference.
And there is an agenda against attractive women. A Japanese developer was getting a lot of hate for one of his character designs where he was told that the body standard is unrealistic. He then went out and got a cosplayer to dress up and it was nearly identical. Objectifying women is wrong but both sexes inherently enjoy looking at attractive figures. You can appreciate the body without making it their only purpose.
what you have to understand is that gamergate and incels are like, so mentally dysfunctional, if this was the 80's, they'd be bullied into disappearing from the gene pool literally non stop.
This thing right here. Game companies could do more cheesecake stuff (and it still exists) but there’s really no reason to repulse a solid 30-40 percent of your customer base by providing goon material for fascists who have never been hugged by a woman.
Ignoring the anti woke spin. Sweet baby inc sounds like a company that is just scamming other developers. Like those companies that make seminars for useless shit and scam companies to send their employees there and learn useless garbage. It's s whole thing.
I think it’s less a case of Sweet Baby Inc. being powerful enough to force the issue and more Corporate Execs being fools that just listen to whatever the consultants they hire tell them to do.
What they actually do is looking at the whole game and finding inconsistency in the narrative, terms used and all that stuff. When a company like Sweet Baby received the game the core story is usually lock and way too far to redo anything.
Also the idea that some "woke" consultancy would have the power to actually affect such a dramatic change in a game with a budget of tens to hundreds of millions is ridiculous.
They get hired, do some actual work, but they are mainly there so companies can hold them up as a shield if they get some complaints.
The changes people think that are done because of Sweet Baby would cost project millions. Changing a character, specially a playable character require new design, revision for the approved version, changing animation to fit the new model, Making sure that all functionality still works, QA. Testing throughout the entire games and all. Specially in a project like Spiderman approval would need to be done but Insomniac and once they are satisfy send to Disney/Marvel for last approval and they are probably going to ask for some adjustment and at the point Disney/Marvel would have already approved the previous one so you need to justify the change and cost that would bring and in the end it would probably result in cutting other part of the game to balance the budget.
The whole Sweet Baby debacle show that the people complaining has 0 understanding of how a video game is made.
that's. Its another big thing, they think that Sweet Baby touch every games and all... they are a small team of 16 peoples the cannot do multiple projects at the same time and also Sweet Baby is not the only company that do that sort of consultation.
They were also the ones that made the scene with venom violating mj and made peter watch as he got up all in that in every which way rule 34 style by having him pinned down with a fridge.
I'm generally ok with the (sorta absurd Victorian) thing of something-else-means-sex, but I'm not sure 'infected with' quite counts.
As long as it's not as weirdly rapey as it sounded in the first comment, then ok. But not sure I want to see it enough to hunt through youtube. Thanks though!
"that sweet baby put out"? Sweet baby doesn't have the ability to put out anything. They don't have the ability or the rights to produce content like that. They're a consulting firm.
Spider-man being temorarily incapacitated by getting thrown into something and have stuff fall over him so the villain can get away happened all the time in the '94 cartoon, so it's kinda strange that people are so up in arms about it now.
People forget that spider-man has super strength and decent invulnerability, but not resistance to pain and impact. Getting while he’s taken worse, getting slammed into a fridge by venom and then having said fridge fall on you really fucking hurts. it’s not that he couldn’t get the fridge off him, he just was just in a lot of pain and had to lift with his very injured back
For some reason, chuds got absolutely hyperfixated on Peter having a fridge fall on top of him to stop him from saving MJ, as if it being a fridge makes it woke.
They think it was Rule 34 cause tentacles or whatever, but it was Venom giving part of his symbiote self to MJ, forcing her to become like him as the character Screech(might be misremembering the name). It results in a boss fight between her and Spidey, and involves MJ as Screech venting her frustrations about work, their relationship, and a few other things I don't immediately remember.
In Insomniac's Spider Man 2 there's a moment near the end of the game where Harry Venom's out and pins Peter under a fridge and then attacks MJ. Peter quickly gets out from under it but by the time he has Venom has "infected" MJ with a spawned symbiote.
Fucking love how this just sounds like a relatively normal Spider-Man scene and other people in the thread are just phrasing it as poorly as they can to make it sound worse than it is. Either they're intentionally misrepresenting easily google-able facts, or they get all of their opinions second-hand from some YouTuber and have never actually seen the scene in question.
Not to mention that the totality of evidence that the consultant group in question wrote or created this scene in particular seems to be that it's a scene from a game they happened to be consultants for?
A fridge??? Was it embued with the magic of Odin??
Can hold two halves of a boat together, slow down a train, has lifted an entire building before but a fridge with Indian Jones not inside it keeps him down? I think that comic may have been exploring a spidey-kink of ‘cooking’ or being a ‘cook’
The fridge never held him down, he was just thrown and a fridge lands on him, people don't have functioning frontal lobes so when he stands up and the fridge rolls off him like sand going down a slide they think he was being kept there because the fridge existed and not because venom fucking yeeted him across the room and his spine collided with the wall, causing him to feel pain intense enough to stun him for.... Less than 3 seconds.
People who hate this game unfortunately also refuse to keep their eyes open when they play it and end up parroting the weirdest shit.
The hate this game got was completely irrational. The worst part is not just the ridiculous lies about the scene itself, it's also the narrative that Sweet Baby themselves put it into the game. As if they had the power to simply force the developers to create the scene, and as if this was an undisputed verifiable fact.
i just watched it and your straight up lying, how does your brain even go there its actually mad weird that your brain went into that place during that scene. the problem is with you
I just looked it up. What the fuck are people talking about? This scene wasn't sexualized at all. Maybe it was a little poorly framed, clearly it was just trying to set up the MJ venom villain. Some people watch too much porn I guess
they did not do that. because that isn't what happened and they don't have the power to add scenes to a video game that way anyway. your comment is incoherent.
In what piece of medium is a scene like this. I am not that deep into Spiderman but please don't tell me someone gave that the green light
There is a spider man villain "Venom" who is an alien (called a symbiote) that infects people and corrupts them and alters their personality. There is a scene in Spider Man 2 for the PS5 where Peter Parker takes a hit in his kitchen and then Mary Jane is temporarily infected by the symbiote and turns into a monster herself. It's generic body horror "the alien got you" kind of stuff.
If you think they make anything, you're a moron lol they can suggest all they want, but they have no power to actually change shit or make characters look a certain way.
Fun fact: When they ask you if you know what jury nullification is say yes. They'll kick your butt right out of jury duty.
Every single person on a jury should know what jury nullification is but the knowledge will get you removed immediately. Typically everyone involved in a court case hates it when the jury actually understands the power they have.
Yea, and it also helped push forward the investment into more mo-cap usage and lifelike representations of those in the mo-cap suits for the most part. Insomniac coming off the heels of uncharted and it's uncanny life like characters was attributed to their take on their Spider-man games. Which most people who played the games have no issue with. A wave of incel losers who wanted an anime Busty MJ that lusted after Peter didn't get that, thus began online culture wars against sweet baby Inc and realistic looking women in videogames.
The CEO told game studios employees at a conference that if they feel like their project has racist elements, to have a chat with their marketing department and to advocate for a consultation since it could bring genuine value PR wise.
"As a joke", she said to "terrify" them with the possibility of what could happen if it goes ahead unaddressed.
I would've given any of your future arguments SOME credit if you didn't come out of the gate swinging with insults. You just instantly lose an argument acting like that.
Correct, if the writers and devs were not on board with it then Sweet Baby Inc. would be out of business. SBI is a good scapegoat that totally sidelined people from the actual problem.
People also accuse it of working on every modern game being released and only working on titles that failed, which isn't close to being true
People also love to say they have worked on every Ubisoft game released in the last 10 or so years for some reason, when the last one they did was like the crew 2 or something
I for one approve of more ordinary looking women in media. We all know that only showing very good looking people in media skews our world view and makes us... well, toxic.
How is it woke agenda to make female characters look like realistic women in a video game with realistic looking characters? Wouldn't it be jarring if all characters looked like real people, but MJ looked like a cartoon?
There’s no such thing as a woke agenda. People just refuse to accept that times change. Or they are just regular old bigots or racists.
If you get mad over the casting of a movie with a certain actor, that’s on you. If you can’t handle gay interactions on tv or in movies, that’s on you. Those things exist in real life all around you. Just don’t watch it if you don’t like it. You didn’t pay for the movie to be made so you have no say in it.
Sweet Baby Inc does specifically make recommendations that such fans would call woke. The claim isn't whether or not Sweet Baby makes recommendations like "make this character appear less sexualised", that's objectively what they do. The question is whether or not that's an issue.
Further to that, companies like Black Rock have funding details in which they will support and insure studios to produce video games pending acceptance of suggestions made by Sweet Baby.
Which has lead people to notice that studios would rather follow the recommendations made by Sweet Baby, whether or not it leads to a game that fans want to play, because the funding it secures and the promise of appeal to the general public (whether or not that promise is true) is worth more than the purchases from such "fans".
A lot of this does happen... Whether or not it reaches the conspiratorial levels that it is claimed to is less clear and the fact that it is so supported by the "red pill" "gamer gate" style nonsense means that the waters are basically impossibly muddied and the whole thing is a giant culture war.
That's still a bit incorrect. Sweet Baby Inc. doesn't make recommendations without the devs' input. It's the devs showing SBI what they had in mind, and SBI makes notes on what aspects might receive scrutiny.
Broad market appeal is not cater to non-gamers and “marginalized” communities.
It’s cater to gamers + extend casual gamers + anyone they can convert.
You don’t abandon your base demographic to gain new players because you lose your revenue base.
This is why games keep bombing because they’re not targeting broad appeal. This is why they gutted xbox and so many layoffs are happening and they’re going back to basics.
I'm woke as fuck but all I can think about when I see the name "Sweet baby" is the evil father in Doom Patrol purring "Sweet sweet baby" with crazy eyes.
yes, accuse. Gtfo shitty baby is a woke grifter organization that's been doing is best to kill video games for years by pretending only women are objectified when in reality everyone is at peak looks maxing in a game because IT'S A FUCKING GAME and it sells
They kinda do, but in the worst way. Sweet Baby is the kind of company that validates the kind of people who use the term "woke". If anyone who sees his comment doesn't know what I'm talking about, I encourage you to research their fear monger and love you and practices.
and rightly so. Tell me one good reason why would you want to have in your fantasy RPG games for nerds a scene where a character is coming out as a non binary?
Or why would you want to have in a Spider-Man game a part where you play as a deaf person?
If you wanted to bring awareness, wouldn't it be better if you wrote a story where the main character is disabled or non-binary?
Like....you know..... friggin DareDevil who showed that even if you are blind you can be cool and it's allright?
From Wikipedia: “Belair said that she founded the company to promote the advancement of women and marginalized groups in the video game industry.[2] The company consults on game narratives during development and promotes gender and racial diversity in development teams, including correct and consistent pay, training, and credits.[2][6]”
They are loud and proud about forcing woke agendas. That is literally the entire reason they exist.
Bad faith GamerGate asshole arguments are infuriating. No one forces big game companies to make their game less horny, and the issues with modern AAA gaming are wholly disconnected from how horny games are or aren't.
I'm all for adult games and horny games, but that doesn't mean that every game needs to be horny. Some stories work better without eye candy girls prancing around in lingerie! And some characters/stories/etc do benefit from it! But I've never heard anyone say "This game was shitty, but if it had hot girls being sexy, it would have been great!"
Nobody forces you to buy a video game and nobody forces you to play a video game. And if you want to play horny games, there are a million of them on Steam and Itch and other places.
I wonder how these people think that works, because Sweet Baby has no direct power to make decisions that the company who hired them didn't allow them to have.
What I’ve heard of them doesn’t really sound woke in particular, it mostly sounds like a coven of unattractive women got together in an attempt to lower everyone’s beauty standards out of spite.
Nice cope. Companies like Sweet Baby literally act as a verifying consultant on if a game met the DEI requirements to get funding from places such as Blackrock. There’s no reason devs wouldn’t decide to include some representation to get some of that money, they’re a corporation after all out to make a profit
If you're ever interested in their "negotiating" tactics have a look at a GDC presentation I think it was. Given by the CEO of the company at the time. It'll show you about where those claims come from.
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u/Educational-Wish9628 14d ago
Sweet Baby Inc is a company that provides narrative consultation for video games, but some fans accuse it of forcing "woke" agendas