Despite its vague-sounding name, Sweet Baby Inc. is a consulting firm that works with video game developers on the stories, scripts, and characters for their titles. It was founded by former Ubisoft employees Kim Bellaire and David Bedard.
The company's games include Alan Wake II, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, and Sable, an impressive roster for a small consulting company.
“We work with clients, other game developers, or internal teams to help people improve their stories in any way they can,” David Bedard said in a 2021 interview on the myVGBC podcast He spoke at
As Bedard also discussed in that podcast, the company is also concerned with diversity and inclusion on a number of fronts. “We've been working hard for a long time to offer a portion of our contracts to up-and-coming writers so they can earn credits and turn that into employment in the future,” he said. said.
Sweet Baby Inc. sounds like an ambitious and highly successful narrative consulting company with some great goals, but why is it such a hot topic online?
What's wrong with Sweet Baby Co., Ltd.?
A small but vocal segment of the online gaming fandom has accused Sweet Baby Inc. of manipulating the direction of the games it develops to promote “wokeness” in video games. I am.
Elon Musk posted about this Xresponded to a lengthy video by right-wing activist Matt Walsh who claimed that video games were trying to “indoctrinate millions of children through entertainment.”
Musk wrote: “Video games need to weed out the woke crowd. Being preached to with boring propaganda is not the reason people play games!”
However, Walsh's key example was not the Sweet Baby Inc. game, but Life is Strange, which was published three years before the consulting company was founded.
Bold claims made by Sweet Baby include that the company is partly to blame for the relative failure of the Suicide Squad games, and that the character in Alan Wake 2 (Saga Anderson) was endorsed by the company. Examples include being made black instead of white.
The latter is refuted Alan Wake 2 X. by Game Director Kyle Lowry.
Complicating matters here, in some projects Sweet Baby Inc. has enriched the characters and created more authentic characters from other cultures that the developer's writers may not have a deep connection with. It is possible that you are responsible for making it visible.
Such a job might be likened to a movie studio hiring consultants to see how faithfully a culture is represented or how legitimate the supposed science in a science fiction movie is. . Or it could be compared to a best-selling author hiring a researcher.
The attention to Sweet Baby Inc. may have started much later in 2023, when it was featured as a topic on Kiwi Farms, a toxically designed chat room where users discuss subjects of online harassment.
This then spread to other mainstream platforms such as Reddit and Discord, where a curated stream list was created to identify games that Sweet Baby Inc. had worked on.
Until then, Sweet Baby Inc. had primarily been in the public eye only for the titles it developed for the Playdate handheld console, such as Lost Your Marbles.
Eurogamer has written an article about the reactions of prominent people involved in the game, which is well worth a read. This highlights why a small consulting firm is highly unlikely to have much leverage over the multi-billion dollar companies that employ its services.
What is Gamergate 2.0?
This is also one of the reasons why Sweet Baby Inc.'s online harassment trend has been dubbed Gamergate 2.0.
The original Gamergate was held 10 years ago. Its supporters claimed that this was a movement about ethics in games journalism, but this did not work through the collective actions of loosely defined groups.
Targets include game developer Zoe Quinn and media critic Anita Sarkeesian, who until last year hosted the YouTube channel Feminist Frequency.
The vitriol directed at these individuals may be comparable to the relentless scrutiny that Kim Bellaire faces online, but her male co-founder David Bedard He doesn't seem to have experienced any attacks.
Similarly, Gamergate was brewed on the 4chan and 8chan internet forums, the predecessors of Kiwi Farms. Service provider Cloudflare shut down 8chan in 2019, calling it a “hate cell pool” and saying it had inspired multiple mass shootings in the United States.
The Evening Standard has contacted Sweet Baby Inc. for comment.
