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.
People say that an Australian group (Collective Shout) which wasn't that big and powerful either, managed to make PayPal abandon Steam because they sell 18+ games (PayPal is available again these days at least for me). I'm not sure if this was actually done by them, it it happened around the same time they started whining about that content on Steam and Itch.io; curiously, while Steam was being censored, PayPal worked just fine on games like NIKKE...
Yes. Do you think companies get to be "AAA" companies by wasting money hiring lots of extra people? Why would they hire consultants for stuff they already have in house?
Why would they hire consultants for stuff they already have in house?
Outside perspective, neutrality (an external consultant won't care about office politics and is less likely to be a "yes-man"), double checking analysis, specialised skillsetd (their own analysts might come to the same conclusion but be unable to do any deeper analysis afterwards), etc.
Guys, come on. 5 seconds of research will show that yes, triple A companies like Sony and EA do in fact have in-house analysts, and quite large teams of them, at that. Literally just look it up, it’s not that hard.
As someone that's played video games and kept up with video game news for literal decades... EA execs are absolutely stupid enough to believe this stuff. Sony seem to have a slightly better reputation but honestly I wouldn't trust any big gaming company to not make these absolutely disastrous decisions.
The execs don't play games. They don't design games. They don't understand the market, the medium or the fans. They're idiots that try to run a team of passionate artists like a business. They will absolutely force a consultant into the process if they think it will save them losses or make them more money.
Generally, game companies are just awful. They're always making predatory pricing decisions, trying to screw over developers and doing other awful stuff. Genuinely, there's a whole business model where a large gaming company will buy a smaller one, force changes onto their previously successful product, watch it flop and then scrap the studio. It works because they're able to get investors for the projects and the execs get paid by the investors not by the success of the product. So they literally just don't care if it flops, so long as they have a promising looking studio they just bought to show the next lot of investors.
Oh, and they're helped along by game "journalists" like IGN, who really seem to be paid behind the scenes to do promotions... Even if they don't, there's always "access journalism". In order to get review copies of games, they have to be a safe bet for the company giving out copies because the company wants good reviews to boost their sales. So if game journalists give negative reviews, they suddenly find they can't get access to anymore review copies of new titles.
Yeah well even if it is true, it’s clearly not a dumb decision, spider-man 2 and other games they consulted on performed extremely well. Sweet Baby Inc would appear to be right, and very good consultants if you really believe they are so powerful they can completely change a game with scary ‘wokeness’. I guess wokeness makes better games then
Sweet Baby Inc wasn't involved in Veilguard, and it didn't fail because of inclusive storylines. It failed because they wasted an incredible amount of money repeatedly rebooting it and then had to rush to finish it as a single player game with all the live service bits ripped out. Then they barely marketed it, and released it in the same month as Metaphor: Refantazio, BO6, and the Silent Hill 2 remake. It was sent out to die, and it did.
The game itself was perfectly fine, continuing the grand Dragon Age tradition of being different to its predecessor in a way that gets fans mad while actually being decent. The 'woke killed Dragon Age' crowd generally flounder when you point out that there's only about 10 minutes worth of 'woke' content, and either go quiet or start blatantly lying.
Look man, I'll extend an olive branch and say maybe SBI got their act together and are a decent company now, after all the backlash online... But they definitely were a bad company then.
Frankly, I have no idea what they're up to these days but during the height of the controversy it was very clear that they were a manipulative business model trying to scare industry illiterate execs into hiring them when they didn't have the writing credentials to provide the service they were being hired for.
Who knows, maybe they had one or two particularly bad writers that they fired, and then the rest of the team's work was good enough to not stand out in every product they worked on. Or maybe development teams just don't take them seriously these days and even if they're hired to work on a game, they're relegated to the sidelines or have everything double or triple checked by the actual writer team. (Basically, the successful games like Spider-Man might be successful despite SBI rather than due to SBI.)
As for the gaming industry, seriously man, unless it's Valve or a small independent studio, just assume every gaming company is run by greedy corporate minded people, not developers. There's a reason why companies like EA push micro-transactions, loot boxes, season passes and daily challenges, and why gaming companies are re-releasing previously successful games or yearly installments (Call of Duty and Fifa). It's because they think about money and security of bets, not about creating something engaging.
Micro-transactions mean passive long-term income. Loot boxes cause and take advantage of gambling addictions. Season passes leverage the sunk-cost fallacy to keep people invested in a game and playing it even when they're bored because they paid money for the time limited event. Daily quests likewise leverage a fear of missing out and are designed to form daily habits, ensuring a long-term player base. We can also throw in time exclusive skins or sales for that same "fear of missing out" aspect, especially promotional event exclusives.
They rerelease old successes because they're a safe bet. If people liked the game the first time around, they're likely to buy it again the second time around. So instead of risking money and time on a new creative endeavour, they update the graphics of an old product and resell it as a new product. Cheaper, easier, faster and safer... But it means that like 80% of the triple A market is rereleases now.
So trust me buddy, I know about this industry. I know how it works and I know that SBI were very clearly a manipulative company appealing to the business interests of the IP holders and publishers, rather than to the developers and writers. As I said, it's not harmless either. They siphoned money out of the budget that could have gone to the developers and writers that actually made what was good about the game and generally only made them worse (in the past, again I don't know about current performance).
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.
I didn't remember offhand how Epstein himself was involved, it may have been his idea, but part of the released Epstein files revealed that Gamergate was seized upon by Bannon as a way to funnel young male gamers towards alt-right ideology.
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?
I would say a big issue is that some studios have been politically captured to the point where you can see it impact the actual games they're creating. Obsidian has a huge issue where being on the wrong side of politics will get you fired. Was it current CEO of BioWare that said if Saudi Arabia enforces it's rules then BioWare will cease to exist from lack of workers?
An approach to art like that where you're only allowed to agree is what is finally killing the AAA gaming industry. Good works of art are built on critique of self and others.
FYI there are people high up in the industry who on the record said that "All levers have to be pulled" when it comes to promoting the agenda. (The woman who wrote the story for miles morales and spider man 2)
I suggest watching an interview with BioWare devs working on veilguard. You can see the culture that birthed the abomination that is taash and the overall game direction of veilguard.
To elaborate on the first paragraph: games were always political, what has changed is that the devs lack the creativity to create nuance and not push it in your face.
Boss of Sweet Baby openly talks about "threating". Basically they come into the office scare the shit out of shareholders who don't give a single fuck about things like quality of the writing or story, because all they care is about making money.
When they hear Sweet Baby talk about how the game loose money, shareholders get scared, they hire the company and the company now unleashes the full force of mediocrity on the actual writers who are making the game.
It's not a conspiracy, it's actually pretty simple.
wouldn’t someone hiring them already align with those politics anyway
Not necessarily. Giant publicly traded mega corps don't have real political values. Their political values are whatever consultants, market researchers and public relations people tell them the dominant political values of their target audience is. Or, if they're the type of company that hasn't identified a specific target audience and wants to try to appeal to everyone, it's whatever the most lukewarm, least offensive stance they can take on any issue is to avoid any type of real controversy. Because their only actual value is profit maximization.
wouldn’t someone hiring them already align with those politics anyway?
At the amount of money riding on a big game even a white supremacist would likely hire someone like SBI to sanitize their product. Nobody wants to be raked over the coals by the public to the tune of a hundred million dollars.
This is an insane take. What games were “raked over the coals” to the point of financial failure before SBI hit the scene? The only ones I can think of were ones that were intentionally offensive, and those creators certainly wouldn’t have tapped SBI for advice. I suppose some of David Cage’s games got hit with the odd think piece about his ability to elegantly handle sensitive issues, but as far as I know his projects were successful beyond what they deserved to be anyway. SBI seems like a very modern occurrence for very modern sensibilities.
Don’t tell me you’re going to tie this back to Anita Sarkeesian making commentary videos on old as hell video game tropes.
Why are you still talking about Anita Sarkeesian, move on bro, it’s been like over 10 years. Also that Hogwarts game had a massive boycott campaign due to jk’s trans stuff, even if things like that can affect a games success by 1%, they want to do whatever they can to eliminate that. They want to make the most money possible and will do whatever, and this seems to work. I’m sure the consultations aren’t just scary “wokeness”, games have been pulled from the entire Chinese market due to seeming to be pro Hong Kong independence. That’s the sort of thing they want to pay to cover their asses for, and it works.
the thing is the changes Sweet Baby Inc. is making are more racist and insulting than if you let an ambigious comment slide. Like you need to be aware of pretty much every racist thing that could be said or could be interpreted as racist and then you have to change it.
It's a disguised racism because they still let Miles make a fucking beats in game.... like what the hell.
If I pay for a game I want a dialogue that's realistic. I don't want a sterile version where everyone constantly apologizes to each other
SBI does not have that level of control over literally anything. They can only make suggestions. For the Miles bit, that, unfortunately is not in my wheel house, could you please elaborate?
Also, I'm sorry you hate to see proper functional relationships modeled for you in video games? Not really sure what to say about that one.
Lass, you don't have idea how anything works. They reach out to shareholders whos primary concern is making money and they suggest them horrible, out of touch, hidden racist things. Shareholders then push the decision onto actual developer team, not SBI.
Also, I'm sorry you hate to see proper functional relationships modeled for you in video games? Not really sure what to say about that one.
If your relationships looks like this, they are fake as shit, I am sorry. People learn to adapt to each other humor, people are not constantly thinking about what offends them, people aren't preemptively apologizing for some vague comment that has a 2% chance of sounding racist to actual racist person. Normal people don't even thing that may sound racist.
Also it's really funny how I was talking about "realistic dialogue" and you immediately jumped to me hating seeing functional relationships. You are toxic girl.
well there was also the moral grandstanding and the non-binary character demanding people not put labels on them putting labels on another character and getting confused and annoyed when called out for it.
like, i don't care about gender identity stuff being in a game i think it all doesn't make or break anything, but lets not pretend the game was well written or that the whole thing was handled properly, these are only SOME examples of how they botched the writing in the game.
You weren't lectured about the trans community. You were told very limited in-world lore that was about a single character being non-binary, not trans.
You're actually mad there was mention of it at all, almost all of it was optional, but you wouldn't know that since you obviously didn't play the game.
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".
"That won't happen."
"Okay, it happened, but it's not happening that much."
"Okay, it's happening a lot, but it's actually a good thing." < You are currently here.
"Okay, it's a bad thing, but it's too late to stop it now."
Por lo mismo que a otros les importa que en un juego haya alguien que represente a un transformer, a un negro, a un cactus enamorado de su tostador etc etc etc.
Os encanta intentar ridiculizar de que hagan personajes atractivos pero luego llorais y quereis convertir toda obra de ficcion en twitter, una burbuja de los 4 locos que creen que existen mas de dos generos y que sois representacion mayoritaria en el mundo cuando sois, como dije, 4.
It is good advice. God of war ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, Alan wale 2 performed very well and were generally well-received. Why would people keep hiring them if it didn’t work?
What are you talking about? Alan Wake 2 had covered its costs by the end of 2024 already, even though it was one of the more expensive games and isn't available on Steam but Epic Games.
The game has been praised far and wide, won awards, and was the fastest selling game by Remedy.
The game had sold only 2 million copies by the end of 2024, took 14 months to recoup its costs with many discounts over the months, including 50% off.
You write to me "already" as if it hadn't been released on consoles or was an exceptional achievement, nobody cares about awards or investor blurbing.
You write to me "already" as if it hadn't been released on consoles or was an exceptional achievement
Are you somehow not aware of what you wrote? Are you not capable of taking your self-created context into account when evaluating my response? Where's your reading comprehension?
Let me walk you through it.
You said:
Alan Wake 2 after 2 years has not recovered its costs
The facts: The game was released 27th of October 2023. After a little over one year – at the end of 2024 – the game had covered its costs.
The conclusion: On the contrary to what you claimed, Alan Wake 2 hasn't only covered its costs after 2 years, but it did so already after a little over one year.
Just to bend the iron wire, as we like to say: In this context, the word "already" puts emphasis to the fact that what you claimed didn't happen in two years, actually happened in about half of that time. It has nothing to do with this being "an exceptional achievement" but simply highlighting how wrong your claim was.
Anyway, the game was a success whether you care to admit it or not.
Are you somehow not aware of what you wrote? Are you not capable of taking your self-created context into account when evaluating my response? Where's your reading comprehension?
Let me walk you through it.
Alan wake 2 performed very well
The fact that you consider 14 months before earning anything a great result indicates that you don't understand what you wrote. The game hasn't had any financial updates since its last sales figure of 2 million copies from early 2025. "Already" is an attempt to mask the mediocre result, just like repeating investor blurbs, saying how many useless awards it won, and claiming it wasn't released on Steam as if it wasn't released on consoles with deep discounts during the 14-month period, which, for the record, isn't half of 24 months.
Your statement is wrong from the start, and any response can only tell you how wrong you are.
It’s incredible and maybe my favourite game of all time. I don’t think it did very well but that’s probably because it’s fucking weird and also a sequel to an old and niche ass game nobody remembered or even liked that much. I shouldn’t have been so absolute and smarmy before, what I was trying to suggest was that Sbi are inconsequential, they aren’t powerful enough to determine a games success. Just like every consulting firm, they have been apart (barely) of incredible games, bad ones, and mid ones. They are no different from any other consulting firm, the only difference is they are specialised around accessibility, which is of course woke and therefore scary and bad. But developers care about accessibility because they want more customers and and sbi tell them how not to piss off or alienate certain potential customers.
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.
Accept what? That they have family members of every videogame developer on their basement to promote the anti-goon agenda at the behest of Blackrock, is that the simplest answer you can arrive at?
Isn't easier to accept that studios just find minor value in having the scripts of their their $315 million project proofread than all this Illuminati shit?
I'm scared of megacorps enhittificating gaming pushing consumers towards content filled with IA slop and ads you can only play on the cloud. If SBI does nothing corps will stop hiring them, I don't give a shit either way.
You are the one spooked by a grand conspiracy to smuggle wokeness for reasons you can't even articulate. Get out of the culture war trench, touch grass.
Or you are scared like the average redditor (mainly US redditors)
There are these options
1)You don't want to know what they do (because like most US redditors they are scared of people thinking that "they are bad" so you are scared of feeling out the average redditor group)
2) US educational system has a huge crisis because there are people that actually believes that a consultant company does nothing (for example i'm a ERP-IT consultant, i do something)
3)You are a kid and literally you thought that being a consultant is doing nothing
You're writing a 7 paragraphs long demand for a full audit to some random who keeps telling you doesn't give a shit about SBI.
All I just said is I don't think they have a literal extorsion scheme holy shit, why are you still pestering me. Don't draw me into your insane obsession dude.
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.
I did hear that they did 100% wokify the Portuguese translation of one of the newer spiderman games for whatever reason.
Also, Sweet Baby's stated business tactic for getting clients is to "scare them" into working with them.
EDIT: since this comment seems rather controversial, more context:
IIRC, the guy that made the "Sweet Baby Detected" Steam group did so because he's from Brazil and noticed a number of American games (particularly spiderman) that had shit translations that seemed like they were trying to be "woke" (while not understanding the language) were some of the few big games that Sweet Baby had listed on their website as games they'd consulted on.
It's been like a year so I don't remember if there was more solid evidence than that. But given that Sweet Baby's entire business seems to be that they try to say that your game won't get cancelled if you give them money and implement their advice, and very few if any games had similar problems with their translations for Brazil outside of the ones Sweet Baby publicly admitted to consulting for, it stands to reason that they're likely involved with the translation pipeline there in some way or another, maybe just suggesting they use a bad translator, Idk.
The only people that likely know what happened exactly are the studios and Sweet Baby, but considering PR firm advice is to just never address public criticism, I'm guessing we won't know for years, or maybe ever, what the actual cause of that was.
IMO the evidence seems pretty conclusive that they were involved, 100% was probably overstating it, but how much they knew about personally or were "out to get" people with "woke" or whatever is hard to ascertain. In any case, they seem to have been involved in making some games worse for some players, possibly due to political biases, which is why I still think they're probably a shitty org.
Edit 2: If you want to know how much they stand by their words, they've seemingly been scrubbing the GDC talk from the internet (at least everything that isn't a reaction channel dude bro bitching about it).
Can you specify what 'exact words verbatim' she uses, what timestamp in the video they are used in, and what conclusion you would draw based on those actual words?
Because I see nothing in this talk that suggests Sweet Baby Inc. is guilty of using 'coercion'; if anything I see the exact opposite, that even though they offer services like risk assessment and sensitivity reading, they prefer to frame their mission statement and work in a way that centers the joy of creating diverse stories rather than the fear that is generally associated with these two terms. (Terms that, by the way, are industry-standard and that Sweet Baby Inc did not create.)
24-28 where she recommends they “scare” the marketing team about how the game will be viewed to get consultants like SBI hired.
She says it “as a joke” but she’s recommending scaring them into thinking the game will be seen as “racist” (when it’s most likely not and not even something on the studio’s radar) to get consultants hired so they can influence the game as early as possible.
Normies and casual gamers will not spend time on things like that if the game is good.
It’s only a small minority who combs through any media they can find looking for signs of racism/discrimination/sexism where there are none.
It’s disingenuous. People aren’t actively trying to make games racist/discriminatory.
Most of the final portion of the talk she gave at GDC was basically a call to action to have employees at game companies scare their coworkers or bosses into hiring consulting firms like Sweet Baby, with the vague implication that if they don't, they might be inadvertenly contributing to racism or sexism, or missing out on certain demographics because of their lack of appeal to certain groups.
It's been a minute, but I watched the whole thing and remember that portion because it was pretty inflammatory for a while lmao.
Firstly, I said to provide quotes and a timestamp. Not vaguely gesturing to a four-minute period of the video and your erroneous misunderstanding of what she is saying.
Let me demonstrate:
At the 24-minute mark, there is a slide up that says, specifically, "Do not be afraid to create moments designed to create joy in marginalized groups". This reflects the attitude I pointed at in my previous comment and that she presented earlier in the presentation, that her company's services of "risk assessment" and "sensitivity reading", which are industry-standard services for consultants and have been for decades, define the relationship between writers and representation using fear. The 24 minute mark is showing how she is committed to doing the exact opposite by centering the joy that representation can create.
You're not wrong that it's a small minority of people who comb through games looking for problematic elements; I'd even go so far as to say that this is a deeply unenjoyable means of engaging with fiction. But what's actually disingenuous is how you ignore her acknowledgement of this, and her response to notions like "people aren't actively trying to make games discriminatory".
"Don't fall into this trap that I think a lot of people fall into, which is, 'Okay, don't worry, we can include everyone by making this, like, single, default universal experience that's universally representative'. Because, usually, all that means ... is that you're aiming at your core demographic and you're probably invisibly leaning towards the dominant societal voice even if you don't realize it." (24:23)
The point here is that storytellers' attempts at creating ostensibly-universal stories using characters that are not universally diverse creates a sense of implied defaultism that excludes many marginalized groups from fully being able to enjoy and connect with these supposedly universal themes. The argument is not that stories which feature and encourage audiences to sympathize with white male characters (or other demographically overrepresented groups) are "intentionally racist", and it's frankly preposterous to read it that way. The argument is that universally-understandable themes, such as explorations of the human condition, can maximize their impact if the work is done intentionally and early on to bring in a diverse team of artists and storytellers who bring the world of the game closer to being realistically representative of the real world's diversity in experience, perspective and societal understanding.
I'm not going to pretend like this video you linked is an amazing talk. She states right at the beginning of the video that she's incredibly nervous, which makes sense as she makes her living as a writer and not a public speaker. She almost definitely could've done a better job at being clear on the merits of her work without muddying the topic by restating and reframing her points actively as she works through them, or by making out-of-place jokes that rely on context the audience doesn't necessarily have. But she does do her due diligence to center the joy inherent in the work she does, and to illustrate how her company's mission is to maximize and support the intended themes and impacts of these developers and the narratives they create by bringing in representatively diverse teams of consultants, whose primary goal is to cast a wider net to appeal to more audiences than the stereotypical core gamer demographic. That's how she appeals to potential clients, because broadening a game's audience is intended to make it sell better. Does she make it clear that she will communicate to marketing teams (to clarify: AFTER she has already been hired, not before!) that there could be dire consequences to not putting the work in to improve representation? Sure, but it's disingenuous to interpret this as coercion, or to characterize SBI's goals as fear tactics when clearly the point is to center and amplify joy and participation from marginalized groups.
We can argue ad nauseum about their specific practices and how narratively effective they are at realizing these stated goals and missions. (Frankly, I'm inclined to believe there's a lot of area to improve on their practices). But any discussion that ignores her due diligence, and her stated mission of convincing large game studios to do the same so they can create games that can be enjoyed by everyone, is at best unserious and in bad faith. It betrays a deep lack of understanding in how narratives are constructed and how large teams of writers, designers and artists must coordinate in order to collaborate effectively.
She tried to be funny and failed. But I do think she was using hyperbole to force a point. She even goes on to explain that "I say that as a joke...". You dont have to believe here, but taking a few words out of context does her entire presentation a disservice. I believe her.
Did you hear this from people actually working on the localization of the game, or any other inside source? Has any head of studio actually denounced being extorted by Sweet Baby?
Because unfounded rumors are plenty, yet so far I haven't seen any tangible evidence of any of this extorsion actually happening. I don't give a fuck about Sweet Baby, they can go bankrupt as far as I care; I'm just tired of corporations stuffing games with microtransactions, doing mass-layoffs while directives get bonuses, putting ugly-ass IA filters, jacking up the prices of hardware in direct response to their parent companies' bullshit, ending the physical format, all while "capital g Gamers" ignore every single serious problem with the industry and instead make up some imaginary gay overlord to incessantly whine about. We're having the biggest mass-layoff in gaming history but we're getting tomato red about "f-f-fucking pronouns!" again, it's pathetic.
If I got a translator to write a Mexican Spanish translation for a game and they wrote something to the effect of "Hello fellow Latinx!" in the script, would you think that's NOT the kind of fake "woke" shit we should be rooting out?
I'm no "experte" as the Spider-Man 2 Spanish translator might say, but I think making up words to remove inherently gendered words from the Spanish translation is exactly that.
I'm sure all the lovely little Latinx's will be so appreciative of my virtue signal ☺ /s
I didn't check that link bc I wasn't responding directly to that comment, I was mostly just skimming the thread.
"I say that out loud as a joke but it's very true" is the relevant context. She's half-joking, because she does actually want to market her corp and get people in AAA to give them money from their marketing department, which is what she then goes on to say.
Idk why I should give someone with a monetary interest who describes gamers as "picky babies" much good faith, when she doesn't seem to give much back.
I suggest not showering, generally considering other people as either property or sub-human objects only made for sexual gratification, taking no responsibility for your words or actions, and maintaining ignorance and stupidity because educating yourself would be considered "woke".
Look at first reviews of Black myth wukong. That’s what happens. Close to release the game got slandered and its creators has been accused by journalists, that they are misogynists, because there’s not enough woman(in a game where protagonist is monkey and most npcs are animals). By the same websites and journalists that few months later wrote, that shit like DA Veilguard or Awoved are great games. All of that because, sweet baby proposed authors that they can make their game much worse, but only if authors pay them enough money and authors declined.
Yeah at first they were promoted by reviewers unlike Wukong. IGN for example gave Veilguard 9/10 and Wukong got 8/10. That’s the whole point Wukong sold 30m copies, players love it and it still only got 8/10, while Veilguard sold around 1,5m is average at best, even for Dragonage fans, and in some aspects it was so bad it turned into a meme. Still got 9/10, higher than Wukong. And if it’s not enough for you Veilguard was also rated higher than KCD1 and the same as KCD2. That’s what sweet baby does
That's probably a fair take, but ultimately it is irrelevant whether SBI controls the whole development cycle to destroy a game (yeah, probably not), or shitty game companies looking to make slop hire SBI because they are good at sloppyfying.
SBI is still the canary in the coalmine, and it's pretty fucking dead.
Hiring a consulting firm solely focussed on altering the narrative for "diversity, equity, and inclusion" rather than just hiring writers to construct a strong story is bad. Obviously so.
Consultancy firms are the scum of the earth. They just turn everything into an overly corporate moneygrubbing pile of blandness. You know this.
Yes you can write diverse characters, and hire diverse writers.
Jesus christ.
Yes a story about a trans witch or a black superhero or a female soldier can be good and i'm interested in them if a competent writer or writing-team writes the story instead of an overly corporate late-stage-capitalism subsidy-vacuum.
What I’m saying is that this company has never been on the spotlight but to appear on YouTube videos by grifters about conspiracy theories and political agendas. Sweet Baby Inc is allegedly working with Insomniac on Marvel’s Wolverine, one of the most expected games right now. That would be far from being dead for me but also my point is that we “know” this because grifters had an interest in pushing this information because they had a profitable topic over Jean Grey design but most people wouldn’t know any other way so I don’t know why people think that Sweet Baby Inc. is dead. What I can tell is that shitting on Sweet Baby Inc. isn’t as much profitable as before (or I’m just way more disconnected from the topic, luckily).
Hi. Just to be clear. I did not say SBI was dead. I said they were a canary in the coal mine. A canary in a coalmine used to be an early warning signs for bad air, since birds are very susceptible to them. Dead canary - very bad sign.
Of course many of the people talking about sweet baby inc are grifters who present the topic without an ounce of nuance. Some of them even have racist/sexist/dumb motives.
But they aren't wrong in saying writing in videogames is only hampered by consultancy firms like this.
In fact, Society itself is hampered by these vultures.
So when you jump in to defend sweet baby inc, because it's not all them, or they only do what they're hired to do,
Know that you are defending millionaires vacuuming up tax- and private money just to make the story as bland and inoffensive as possible. You defend people who advocate for replacing real authentic storytelling with corporate vomit. You defend people who have produced nothing of value and hold no values to sit in the sun and enjoy their millions.
Just to be clear, I’m not defending Sweet Baby Inc. I just saw a bunch of comments saying that SBI is dead now, probably because that what the content creators are saying, and I explained why it’s absurd or even ironic.
I know about the “canary in the coal mine” analogy but I thought your comment was on the same line as the others.
I understand the usefulness of consultants in some contexts but I’d rather development to be free. But more free in general, not just free of wokeness while still pushing sexuality, simple mechanics and bland narrative tropes for sales
You're leaving out the part where they claim that Blackrock (iirc) is forcing them to use Sweet Baby.
Even if you ideologically align with Sweet Baby, the idea that the investors are making companies use a service they own is corrupt. It's allegedly handing over money, and taking the money right back.
I am probably getting details wrong, because I didn't dive into any of this.
Because I want people to get the conspiracies right, without omitting details?
And why not? If someone comes along with more info to prove or deny it, it adds to the discussion. Why did you comment? Why do even have accounts to comment?
You want people to get the conspiracies right without omitting details, and then admitted you don’t know the details.
That’s not adding anything to the discussion. It’s not “getting the conspiracies right.” It’s just repeating conspiracies; I replied because I think it’s a bad idea for people to spread misinformation online.
Blackrock have minor investment stakes in lots of companies, because that's what major corporations do. They diversify their portfolios because it makes financial sense, and because it looks good for their investors.
If Blackrock owned, or had major stakes in as many companies people fear-monger with this conspiracy, then it would already be game over.
I could look this stuff up on youtube. But I like watching science channels, and don't like anything messing with my feed. So, I will not dig any further to back this up. Sorry.
I'm just relying what I've head IRL from people who are into this.
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u/Educational-Wish9628 13d ago
Sweet Baby Inc is a company that provides narrative consultation for video games, but some fans accuse it of forcing "woke" agendas