Sweet Baby Inc. Controversy Explained
The gaming industry is exploding inwards with lots of layoffs and now we have another controversy on our hands with Sweet Baby Inc. So let us begin from the start what is Sweet Baby Inc.?
For starters, Sweet Baby Inc. is a storytelling firm that collaborates with video game studios to enhance their writing staff. The company offers services to develop and enrich a game's script and storyline. Sweet Baby openly promotes its commitment to inclusive writing practices, emphasizing representation and the portrayal of marginalized groups.
So what happened?
Well, things got out of control pretty quickly following the creation of a Steam Curator Group called "Sweet Baby Inc. Detected". The curator group detects games associated with Sweet Baby Inc.. Sweet Baby Inc. workers took things to Twitter/X and stated that this was harassment and tried to cancel the group and the person who created it. Currently, the group has more than 200k subs.
The members of the group stated that they believe the ideologies represented by Sweet Baby Inc. is ruining the games industry. The reports suggest that the company offered support to Xbox Game Studios, EA, Valve, Santa Monica Studio, 2K, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Warner Bros. Games, Wizards of the Coast. Some users found the 2019 remarks of the CEO from GDC 2019 which stated “So despite the changing face of audiences, despite the changing face of conferences like this one, we still look at our core demographics and say, ‘Okay, they’re white, cis, hetero males.’ And we cater almost exclusively to them. And the problem is that we don’t just cater to them like, ‘You know, here’s something that we think you’ll enjoy.’ We cater to them like a picky baby.We feed them the same thing that we know that they love and we keep on feeding it. We’re like, ‘Here you go. We know you love it. Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.’ So then when they get anything else they react as a picky baby would, which would be like, ‘Oh! No thank you. I do not want this.’ And we’ve actually done this so long that what we’re doing is creating an entire nation of picky babies and they make us scared to deviate from what we actually want to do. Just in case these picky babies don’t want to play our games.”
Following accusations Sweet Baby Inc. CEO talked to Kotaku and stated "Sweet Baby is, at its core, a narrative development company. That means anything from script writing to narrative design to narrative direction, to story reviews. One of the things that we do offer is cultural consultations or authenticity consultations. For us, that generally means that we might be asked to look at a story if there’s a character in it who is marginalized in certain way, and [the studio] wants us to connect them with a consultant who can bring a little bit of authenticity…But the perspective is never that we’re coming in and injecting diversity…For the most part, it’s the reverse. It’s that a company has created a character and they want to make that character more representative and more interesting."
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