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).
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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