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Sweet Baby Inc. employees harass steam group admin for listing their games to avoid them
(boundingintocomics.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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This reads so weird.
The company is... just a consultation company? The kind of one you're supposed to hire when working on a script including minorities et al to ensure you're not accidentally getting something wrong or presenting it in a stereotypical or atypical way?
And for some reason they're angry about someone listing games they've worked on, as if any kind of exposure would ever be bad for a consultation company that, by its very nature, usually works in the background and hence finds it a bit difficult to get exposure?
And at the same time, someone makes a Steam curator list because they're somehow pissed some devs are doing something devs ought to do, hire a company specialized in character writing instead of letting someone less experienced do it?
Do people really, in 2024, not have any bigger issues so they 're busty with this shit?!
(edit)
Ah, it's a very biased "article" that clearly just wants to riff on the consulting company further as if they're responsible for games being bad, not the devs actually making the games. I also frequently blame the visual marketing ad designer for the graphics driver crashes, aye.
Because Sweet Baby Inc is known for forcing a narrative and tokens into the writing, for the sake of diversity on the cost of quality of the story and the characters. A lot of people don't like that.
Now the issue is much bigger than that and I don't like to involve myself with it much, as the controversy attracts a lot of truly bigot people, who also want to stop SBI. So one automatically gets shoved into that corner. And this is exactly what SBI is abusing to their advantage. No one can stop them from destroying good games in fear of getting burned on the stack.
Where is the proof of this beyond speculation? I can't think of a mechanism through which a consultant can force anything. Their contracts would undoubtedly have an NDA that would prevent them from sharing which of their recommendations the client acted on or not.
And guess what? The list is about the games that have involved this company. As in, the feedback is targeting the devs who accepted, not the consulting company that suggested.
Non issue.
I struggle to think of an otherwise good game they have "destroyed" by "forcing" a narrative or token characters.
That is to say, I don't think I can point to a case where the game would have been otherwise good. Adding badly written characters to bad games does make them if anything marginally better (at least they're consistent 😅), plus unless the devs completely lost control of their own project the consultation company would not actually implement the characters. They'd give you background stories, profiles, example interaction scenes where they took scenes and re-did them with their characters, or example lists of character archetypes to utilize this profile in.
The actual (bad) writing, (bad) characters and (bad) narrative are still up to the devs to (badly) add.
(edit)
I mean just going by their official project list, I can only personally mark out Suicide Squad, BattleShapers and Sable as bad, and none of these games needed their inclusionism - such as it is, you could argue Suicide Squad makes a mockery of it anyways - to be terrible games, they were plenty able of being that on their own. Plus again, it's the devs doing that, not the consulting company.
One of the examples I've seen of SBI "forcing inclusivity" was making Saga in Alan Wake 2 black. I'm not familiar enough with SBI's work to do make a real judgement, but if this is one of the examples being used to say that SBI is making games worse, then the curator list is dumb.