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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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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.