The relationship between video game developers, representatives of gaming media and ordinary players is hardly ideal. More often than not, it's quite the opposite, as it often comes down to scandals, loud quarrels, and angry comments for every taste. But some scandals are louder and more absurd than others.
One of these scandals has been unfolding in the gaming industry quite recently, and its consequences seem to be so ingrained that they will always be present in one way or another. We are talking about a conspiracy theory according to which game developers, together with journalists, deliberately promote "leftist" and so-called "woke" values. That is, racial and gender diversity is allegedly coming to the forefront of game development, and for the sake of its observance, all other elements are pushed to the background. And in the center of it all is Sweet Baby Inc. What is going on here and is there any truth in such accusations?
Sweet Baby Inc. – what is it?
In general terms, Sweet Baby Inc. is a Canadian independent gaming company based in Montreal. It is relatively small. According to Wikipedia, as of 2024, it employs only 16 people. The LinkedIn page officially states that the company has "11 to 50 employees." At the same time, 41 profiles can be found on the tab of people involved in Sweet Baby Inc. However, it should be borne in mind that due to the way LinkedIn works, anyone can indicate that they are "involved" in the company, so this number should not be believed.
Sweet Baby Inc. was founded in 2018 by former employees of the Montreal office of Ubisoft, which is the main developer of the Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs series. Screenwriter and narrative designer Kim Belair took the position of CEO, and her colleague David Bedard, who previously worked as a product and content manager, took over as COO. Together, they managed to lure several other Ubisoft colleagues and employees from other game studios.
Sweet Baby Inc. acts as a narrative consultant and helps various studios with scripts for game projects. The company focuses on high-quality representation of racial minorities and other marginalized social groups. Sweet Baby Inc. believes that it is marginalization and stigmatization that prevent many young talents from reaching their full potential. That's why the company also advises studios on decent working conditions for representatives of such groups.
However, Sweet Baby Inc. is also engaged in more "ordinary" things for its field. For example, the company's representatives proofread scripts for errors and add additional content to them to make game worlds seem more intense. It's more about minor things like audio recordings and dialogues of random NPCs. Such things rarely have a direct impact on the plot, but they allow video games to be more interesting and diverse.
The creation of Sweet Baby Inc. was a kind of response to the state of affairs in the gaming industry. After all, developers are mostly doomed to work for large companies, where it is difficult to reveal their individuality. And Belair dreamed of more creative freedom and full control over the situation. These thoughts were reinforced by the events surrounding the #MeToo hashtag, when many female game studio employees reported sexual harassment and humiliation.
The contacts and talents of Sweet Baby Inc. employees allowed the studio to get major clients almost immediately. The company worked on the Assassin's Creed Valhalla script, and its portfolio also includes God of War Ragnarok, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, and Alan Wake 2, while its clients include Valve, Xbox Game Studios, Electronic Arts, and other well-known names.
Alan Wake 2 is worth paying attention to separately. After all, it was this game that started the big scandal.
What went wrong?
At the end of 2023, posts related to Alan Wake 2 and the involvement of Sweet Baby Inc. in its development began to appear on the Kiwi Farms forum. The users believed that the decision to involve Sweet Baby Inc. in the game's development was "potentially one of the biggest scandals in the gaming industry". The Kiwi Farms forum is known for its aggressive policy towards racial and gender minorities, and its visitors often organized group harassment of people. There have also been cases where the forum has been linked to people's suicides.
Around the same time, the online harassment of Sweet Baby Inc. employees began. It was picked up by users of 4chan and Reddit forums. Unfortunately, the gaming industry regularly faces situations where developers receive insults and threats from players. Therefore, at first, the situation around Sweet Baby Inc. did not look like something outstanding. But everything changed with the advent of Sweet Baby Inc detected.
Sweet Baby Inc detected is a Steam curator whose main goal is to identify games developed by Sweet Baby Inc. Of course, the curator does not recommend buying them. Sweet Baby Inc detected has gained enormous popularity and has 413,000 subscribers at the time of writing. The curator's Discord server has more than 10,000 users.
Players accused Sweet Baby Inc. of promoting "leftist" values. The theory arose that it was this company that forced developers to add racial, gender, and sexual minorities to their games. When the company's representatives turned to Valve to regulate the curator's activities, as they lead to violations of the Steam Terms of Service, the curator's creator also accused Sweet Baby Inc. of censorship.
The Sweet Baby Inc. discord server quickly turned into a hotbed of sexism and racism. The server administrator and creator of the channel, Kabrutus, drew attention to this. But he failed to completely reassure his audience. By the way, Kabrutus quickly turned the "ideological" campaign against Sweet Baby Inc. into a way to popularize his own persona. He started a YouTube channel where he talks about "forced diversity" in the gaming industry and started accepting donations.
Moreover, players do not even mind supporting Kabrutus. They see him as one of the saviors of the gaming industry.
"Please save the entire Western civilization from collapse. Good luck with everything and support." "Thank you for your hard work." "You're doing us all a favor! Let's save the gaming industry from these cultural vultures together." These are just a few of the comments that can be found on the Kabrutus donation page.
Of course, gaming media could not stand aside. That's why Kotaku, Game Developer, Eurogamer, and other major gaming sites started publishing articles covering the situation, and their authors clearly supported Sweet Baby Inc. Employees of the game studios with whom the company had managed to work also expressed their support.
But the players saw this as just another sign of a conspiracy. There were calls to boycott new projects by studios that worked with Sweet Baby Inc. The administration of Valve and Discord eventually took notice of Sweet Baby Inc. and carried out a large-scale cleanup on the curator's page and server. However, they continue to operate, focusing not only on Sweet Baby Inc. but also on "promoting leftist values" in the gaming industry.
Today, references to Sweet Baby Inc. are commonplace. The company's name has become a kind of phraseology for video games with a focus on minorities. And some players don't really care whether this is actually in the game. After all, it's easy to blame the developers without having played the games themselves.
What are the roots of the problem?
The situation around Sweet Baby Inc. actually serves as an example of a deeper problem that is rooted not only in the gaming industry, but in the field of entertainment and modern culture in general. It is related to the spread of DEI policy and its ambiguous perception in society.
DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This approach to development takes into account the existence of minorities, people with special needs, and other marginalized populations so that they have the same rights as the rest of the population. Against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo protests, such discussions have become particularly relevant.
That's why today you can find a variety of DEI-related trainings in almost any large company. For bad jokes and frivolous attitudes towards minorities, you can easily lose your job or at least get an invitation to an unpleasant conversation with HR. And even if DEI is based on the right ideas, aimed primarily at humanity, not everyone adheres to such ideals honestly.
For example, some companies specifically hire minorities for certain positions to show investors that they are open to DEI ideals and to increase their own capitalization. However, inside the company, it turns out that "diversity and equity" are not really being followed. This is where rumors of "minority quotas" emerged, according to which certain positions or a certain percentage of employees must be from racial, sexual, and gender minorities.
Diversity is relatively common in popular culture. It can be seen especially well in books and comics. But there were some problems with it in movies and video games.
Most likely, you will be able to name video games with racial minorities in the lead roles without any problems. For example, we have Watch Dogs 2, Grand Theft Auto V, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Mirror's Edge, Sleeping Dogs, and many others. It is more difficult with sexual and gender minorities. That's why the release of Tell Me Why with a transgender protagonist was such a high-profile and discussed event that its echoes can still be heard today.
In addition, games often impose unrealistic standards of beauty and social norms. We have already talked about the problem of sexualization and objectification, but this is only a relatively small part of the social nuances associated with the gaming industry. Yes, games allow us to break away from reality and don't have to be connected to the real world in every way. But they shouldn't degrade real people in any way either.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that some gamers have very conservative views. Moreover, they are ready to discuss games in all their manifestations and in the smallest details, because in fact, there are situations when a person has no other hobbies besides gaming. This is where all these heated discussions on the Internet come from.
After all, video games, like comic book movies and tabletop role-playing games, are no longer entertainment "for their own". Sony, one of the largest players in the interactive entertainment market, has been promoting its consoles and games as something transmedia and for the whole family, for all social groups, for several years now. There is a business logic to this, as companies are looking for new opportunities to make more money.
But both conservative, hardcore players and a more "casual" audience that only occasionally looks at video games have money. The gaming industry still has to find a balance between these two groups.
So what is Sweet Baby Inc.'s problem?
To begin with, it is worth understanding that Sweet Baby Inc. is primarily a narrative consultant. The company does not make decisions for developers and publishers, but only gives advice. Whether to listen to them or not is up to each individual.
Developer Rami Izmail, responsible for Luftrausers and Nuclear Throne, also works as a narrative consultant. He shared that this work is much more prosaic than it might seem from the outside.
"As a games industry consultant, lemme tell ya, consulting requires 3 things from you:1. To understand your work is advisory.
2. To understand your position is easily eliminated.
3. To be so damn good at your work that others will continue to pay you to listen to 1) & not do 2)." – This is how Izmail characterized the work of gaming consultants in the context of the Sweet Baby Inc. scandal. Many other professionals working in the field of consulting agreed with him.
Besides, Sweet Baby Inc. is not exclusively engaged in "promoting diversity". The studio's portfolio also includes games like Dota Underlords and The Crew Motorfest, which literally do not have much room for DEI principles(this is not true, the latest playlist in The Crew Motorfest is Donk vs Lowrider, which is about the confrontation between the predominantly black Donk car culture and the Lowrider car culture, which is mostly associated with Latin Americans - ed.) The studio is also working on scripts, creating additional dialogues and setting features. This allows the core developers to do more important things without sacrificing the game's content.
At the same time, it can be noted that Sweet Baby Inc. employees also sometimes responded to all the accusations in a somewhat harsh and arrogant manner. On the other hand, when they are threatened with physical violence, something like this may seem like a completely natural reaction. After all, not all players are willing to compromise.
“They can’t imagine that we’re just talented writers, that we’re talented narrative designers and that people are hiring us because we tell good stories, because we collaborate well, and because we write video games. They have to diminish our accomplishments to our identities. They can’t imagine that the work I did on Spider-Man was story work versus adding pride flags, you know?” – the CEO of Sweet Baby Inc. commented on the scandal in an interview.
Talks about a conspiracy also have no particular basis, again, due to the nature of work in the field of game consulting. After all, all decisions about adding minority characters are made primarily by the main developers. Sweet Baby Inc. only tries to make sure that such characters fit neatly into the overall game universe and do not look too caricatured.
However, for Alan Wake 2, the character's appearance was changed, as well as her race. Players blamed Sweet Baby Inc. for this, but it turned out that the company had nothing to do with it. Remedy itself made such changes, which was confirmed by Alan Wake 2 game director Kyle Rowley.
It's absolutely not true. https://t.co/0EIMDuoMtQ
It's absolutely not true. https://t.co/0EIMDuoMtQ
— Kyle Rowley (@TimePirateNinja) March 4, 2024In the end, it turns out that most of the accusations surrounding Sweet Baby Inc. have little to do with reality. It's just an outsourced gaming company, which is a common occurrence in the gaming industry. It was just unlucky to be in the spotlight.
However, the Sweet Baby Inc. scandal raises several more complex and deeper issues. On the one hand, the mere existence of a DEI consultant in the gaming industry suggests that not all companies are conscientious about minority representatives. Which brings us back to the issue of quotas and flirting with investors. On the other hand, the ideological gap between developers, gaming media, and players is growing. The scandal around Sweet Baby Inc. has become a telling example, but there will obviously be more.
And what to do with all this is completely unclear.
P. S. Of course, fans of Sweet Baby Inc detected could not ignore the situation with Stellar Blade. They described the game as "a beacon of light for gamers around the world, mainly because of the beautiful protagonist," which is a direct quote, but in the end, the developers and publisher were accused of censorship.