Sweet Baby Inc. Employees Show Misunderstanding of and Outright Disdain for Gamers
Alex Gherzo | Mar 4, 2024 |
This Sweet Baby Inc. fiasco keeps getting funnier and funnier, not because much has changed but because the more that comes out about that company and its employees, the more you realize how much they deserve everything they’re getting. After the disaster Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League turned into, people started taking notice of the consultant group and the various games they’ve lent their services to, and this culminated in a Steam user creating a curator telling people which games have Sweet Baby Inc.’s involvement. Now, the employees are melting down on social media, and while the ones who went after the curator’s creator were bad, today, one of them revealed what they really think of gamers. This woman didn’t identify herself or her position at the company, but she went on a diatribe about how gamers are evil and white and Sweet Baby Inc. is but one of many crusading consultant groups that are going to destroy their Nazi regime. She originally posted this on Steam, but here’s her entire statement in screenshots taken by X user Savage Ratchet:
"Every single AAA game in the last 10 years have used a service such as ours"
So that's why gaming has been absolute garbage for that long huh?
Sweet Baby Inc employee basically gives the rundown on why they're destroying video games pic.twitter.com/jmSQTvuFPV
— Savage Ratchet 🔞 (@YGuyCentral) March 4, 2024
If you’re a gamer, look at the disdain these people have for you. She calls gamers – at least, the ones who existed in 1999 – “overweight smelly white nerds who couldn’t get a girlfriend.” If this is how the Sweet Baby Inc. people see gamers, why should anyone in the gaming industry take them seriously? Why should the gamers she’s insulting feel obligated to buy games Sweet Baby Inc. is involved in making? She also doesn’t seem to like white people much (although I guess she threw us a bone by saying it was okay to be white “in essence,” which I guess means not in practice, however skin color is practiced), and she calls everyone who has a problem with them and their influence on video games racist and all the other familiar adjectives. But what she’s saying is patently false; if most gamers want all the things Sweet Baby Inc. puts in the games they consult on, why did Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League fail so miserably? If it appealed to everyone but white men, it would’ve been a lot more successful than it was.
Some of her points are true, however. I’m sure there are plenty of companies like Sweet Baby Inc. consulting on games, and the Hydra motto holds true: cut off one head, two more will take its place. That doesn’t mean you let one head eat you. And the Hydra of Greek myth was not unkillable; Hercules killed it by cauterizing each of the Hydra’s necks after he severed a head. To take the metaphor further than it was intended, the way to stop a practice like this is not to take down the innumerable consulting companies but to make video game developers feel the pain of hiring them, so they stop using them – cauterizing the wound. Sweet Baby Inc. is more an example made than the first domino. As for her taunting question about whether gamers will simply stop buying new games due to the ubiquity of consulting firms like hers, well… have you seen the movie business or the comic book industry lately? Don’t poke the bear.
She also has a point about Sweet Baby Inc. consulting on things they were asked to consult on. This is a point Mauler has made a few times; Sweet Baby Inc. also worked on God of War: Ragnarok, which is a really good game that has no identity politics. (Maybe they were responsible for the level where Atreus and Angrboda walk around a forest and pet some animals; that thing felt like it would never end.) This ties in with what I said earlier: Sweet Baby Inc. and the other consulting firms aren’t the biggest problem. They can live or die on their own, as they’re about to prove. It’s the video game studios that hire them and ask them how to woke-ify their games. For example, while they were no doubt responsible for some of the bad elements of Kill the Justice League (I think Deadshot being black and suggesting the one Batman fought and defeated in Arkham City was an impostor was probably their idea), Rocksteady came up with the concept of killing the Batman from the Arkham games and the rest of the mainline DC superheroes. They’re the ones who need to be made to understand what their customers want, not the mercenaries they hire.
But, again, it’s not quite so simple, and this is another example of Sweet Baby Inc. proving they deserve the disdain they’re getting. X user GameNosh shared a video of Kim Belair, Sweet Baby Inc.’s co-founder, explaining how game studio employees can get their reluctant bosses to hire Sweet Baby Inc. to make their games more DEI-compliant:
The Co-Founder of Sweet Baby Inc Kim Belair proudly explains the method she uses to force bosses at game studios to censor, alter, and "diversify" game projects she feels are problematic – "Terrify them" aka threaten them with the anger of the cancel culture mob. pic.twitter.com/eFJZeKqSZd
— GamesNosh (@GamesNosh) March 4, 2024
She’s advocating for employees of these companies to go around their bosses and scare the marketing team so they’ll do the dirty work for them. First, consider how underhanded this is and how that suggests Kim Belair knows she’s full of it. She wouldn’t have to get other people to act like Chicken Little if she was confident in her argument. And secondly, to quote Dr. Phil, how’s that working out for you? Do the sales for Kill the Justice League indicate that anyone involved had their finger on the gaming world’s pulse? This is not a prophet leading people into the promised land; it’s the Pied Piper leading rats off a cliff. We’ll see if the next batch of rodents finds the tune a little less catchy.
