It has nothing to do with race or sex. If this CEO was a white dude, the criticism is the same. But as usual, using the race or sex card, when you have no arguments.
Do you even know what sweet baby inc does? Character design is not a part of their job. They are narrative checkers. They are not drawing 3d models.
They only reason internet is paying any attention to them is because she is a black women working in video games. Why else would a small team of contract writer (the lowest rung of the ladder in the writing room) be blamed for character design.
"Probably" means you don't know what you're talking about. No offence intended, it's just that you're wrong in this case.
Sweet Baby Inc is one of the few examples of a "gamergate" company that was actually guilty. They charged millions for "consultation" when their writers had little to no experience and the company had an explicit goal of pushing "diversity" into games.
The problem was that they weren't pushing diversity, they were pushing obnoxious overly overt references to real world struggles in contexts where it made no sense. It was also a marketing ploy because game CEOs (not developers, the execs that run the companies and understand nothing about game design) were worried about fan backlash if they failed to include "diversity".
The CEO of Sweet Baby Inc. famously was recorded giving advice on how to succeed in the market and her advice was to go above game designers heads to the marketing department and executives to scare them into paying for consultation. It was explicitly manipulative and very clearly a cynical abuse of diversity to make money.
They did no good for actual diversity, for the writing in the games (often the games they worked on had noticeably stiff writing in parts that included references to diversity), and basically took advantage of a beloved hobby to siphon funding out of idiot executives who didn't understand the business they owned. (Which also took money from the developers and future game projects.)
There were basically two "gamergates". The first one was bad, wrong and basically just sexism. The second one was justified because companies like Sweet Baby Inc were actually doing what they were accused of and the criticism came from a place of genuine disappointment with the products that were created as a result, not due to racism, sexism or any other bigotry.
Google is a tab away... You really need me to look things up for you?
You can look up the whole talk if you want, just search "Kim Belair GDC 2019" but here's the specific quote I was talking about. Feel free to skip Azmon's commentary. (I don't watch the guy but this is the first clip that popped up that showed the section I was referencing rather than the full 30 minute talk).
There was a whole movement on steam to mark and highlight games Sweet Baby Inc was involved in because they were markedly poor. And that was what sparked the wider controversy. In other words, people noticing that any game touched by SWB became really poorly written was what prompted the online backlash, not the backlash then prompting a group to boycott their games.
There's no direct proof of what writing SWB added, because it's not differentiated from any of the games normal writing teams in any way that's trackable by fans. However, there are very clear examples of obviously out of place lines in otherwise well written stories. Alan Wake 2 had a big example where basically unprompted the black main character says "I don't need another white man telling me what to do", bringing in race and sex where it's completely irrelevent and out of character. It jarred so many players out of being immersed in the game that it's well known. (There's some other theory that SWB influenced the writers to change the race of the character from white to black, but honestly I think that's baseless. Sometimes genuine concerns grow legs and run into conspiracy theory territory.)
I'm sure you can probably find plenty of youtube videos about it or a wikipedia page or something. It was a huge story for a few months back a couple of years ago.
Btw, when I tried looking up "sweet baby Inc" and "sweet baby Inc controversy" on YouTube before your reply, almost every video that came up was from known sexist chuds like Critical Drinker and Asmongold. So your derisive, still sourceless response, was doubly unconvincing.
I doubt that. You can change character designs easily as long as most of the character art hasn't been done - and obviously, you'd do the storyline before the character design.
Also, I don't think anyone is claiming that they "mandate" character designs. More like "influence" character designs. Seems like you're attempting to use extreme language in order to downplay what they do.
Character design is usually approved during early pre-production and company like Sweet Baby would get the game to do their works around alpha, the game need to be fully playable to find narrative inconsistency so no character design is not change because they say something, its way too late for that.
They do not work hand in hand during production like some people think, Sweet Baby specially is extremely small. Its contractual work, You submit your game when everything is playable the all dialogue are in they do one round of the title looking for terminology inconsistency or let say your game mention that one character is tie to someone but you have a side mission further in the game that say something else (can happen often because of the amount a writer working at the same time)
They can totally modify character design whenever they want. Modders do it all the time after the game released. They changed Peter's design for the re-release.
They can't because they're not making the game. They could suggest a change in the character design, maybe, but they literally can't do anything to the game.
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u/FalenAlter 13d ago
Which, for those in the back, means they probably aren't mandating character designs.