this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Sweet Baby Inc. employees harass steam group admin for listing their games to avoid them (boundingintocomics.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

2 employees went to twitter to harass a steam group admin for listing the games Sweet Baby Inc. wrote for/were consulted with.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Hi fellow Gamers Lemmings.

This thread was bought to our attention as possibly breaking rule 2 (No Bigotry/Harassement).

First, some context. The article comme from a right leaning website, with mixed factuality and medium credibility.
This means the content of this article shouldn't be taken as is and should be complemented from other, more neutral/factual websites.

For now I didn't find this story on any verifiable sources with such requirement.

On the other hand, the comments seem to be a lot more neutral than the OP link, and raise some interesting points. As such, I'll keep this thread, but will keep it under close watch to keep the conversation civil.

Thank you for your understanding.

Dremor, c/games mod.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

why did you not do this with any other article talking about sweet baby? are you implying kotaku or eurogamer or Nathan Grayson are any less biased? because they are all so well known for good journalism. also maybe use more then one media bias checker because who checks the media bias of the media bias checker i would never use it because they all seem to have bias themself.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Kotaku.
The Washington Post.

I won't say that they are perfect, and are center-left leaning, but at least they enjoy a better credibility ratting than BiC.

I can't say for Eurogamer, I have no data. Feel free to ask any reputable fact checking website for a check.

I'm only pointing that for potentials reader to know that the website isn't known to be factual and do not have a very high credibility. I'd do the same for any left leaning website.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago

im not saying any are perfect im saying they are the same or worse. kotaku specifically has a very bad reputation but your bias checker seems to totally miss that nobody thinks kotaku has a high credibility it has had this reputation for years. seems the bias check is useless if the bias check itself is biased like the sites its supposed to check and how will you check that bias check is not biased itself that's why i don't really care much for checks like that.the Senior editor at Kotaku says you cant be racist against white people that seems a bit biased to me. seems like something someone in that position should not say. seems to undermine the credibility.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Safe bet. If the Sweet Baby employees never talked about this. The curation page and group would have lost traction early and remained in obscurity. Looks like nobody learns about the Streisand Effect anymore.

EDIT I'm still on the curation page and group side of this btw.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (3 children)

So sweet baby Inc (who I never knew of until now) felt attacked by a list on steam which collected titles they worked on (it didn't say avoid apparently, just a list of titles they worked on with proof from their own media).

Kind of telling of the company that they saw this as an offense to them rather than as a tribute. If they thought their work was good they'd advertise this list themselves.

Also, way to dig a grave.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

Well... 4chan is using it as a list of games to avoid. Cant blame them, they've all been stinkers.

I want to add that I'm not against inclusivity. But I am against crappy games.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

At least try and form your own opinions, maybe?

Of the 16 games on the list, 6 of them haven't even released yet, and the average Steam user rating of those remaining is 78%.

Only two are below "Mostly Positive", which are Gotham Knights and Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance, both being "Mixed".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

To be more concrete, we have to see if nearly all of the released games on the list have been subject to "abnormal review activity", which steam automatically excludes from the percentage

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago

Lmao, taking pointers from 4chan

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

God of War Ragnarok and Spiderman 2 are stinkers? This article is entirely whiny gamergate nonsense.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Collecting lists related to a disenfranchised group or the aid of a disenfranchised group is a pretty big red flag of the actor's intentions, especially when that list gets passed around to corners of the internet that are well known to think the problem is not enough disenfranchisement.

4chan lost the right to complain about anything related to D&I in gaming and be treated as anything but subhuman slime after Gamergate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Collecting lists related to a disenfranchised group

Didn't know a consulting company was a disenfranchised group.

4chan lost the right to complain about anything related to D&I in gaming and be treated as anything but subhuman slime after Gamergate.

Amusingly, one of the people Quinn cheated on Gjoni with works for Sweet Baby, just to tie things together. The one that was involved in doxxing and trying to DDoS that crowdfunded game jam project thing that the Vivian James character was created for.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

This article:

… began Kramer, whose work history also includes stints as a PR manager for GamerGate instigator Zoe Quinn

Wikipedia:

In 2014, a defamatory blog post by their ex-boyfriend sparked the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate, during which Quinn was subjected to extensive harassment including doxing, rape threats, and death threats. The following year, Quinn co-founded Crash Override, a crisis hotline and resource center for victims of online harassment.

What’s it called when you blame a victim again?

This article is garbage, and anyone who gives a fuck about this is a simply a moron wasting their life. You’d have to be implausibly stupid to believe that a 15-employee “PC” consulting firm is the root of all evil in the video games industry, yet here they are.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

The thing I find most interesting about the Zoe Post is that the response would have been **radically **different had it been a woman making similar allegations against a man. That Quinn herself made much less detailed allegations against another man 5 years later that led to his career imploding the next day and his suicide 4 days later and she's seen as being in the right for it I think demonstrates that notion pretty well.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago

The "article" is very clearly just a call to forther hate on SGI. It's crazy to what lengths people go to justify their bad purchases, desperately clinging to whatever explanation they can cook up for why there is no self-blame to apply for having bought into the shit that is Suicide Squad. No no, you see, the game would have been awesome if not for that WOKE consulting company! If not for them this would have been a 10/10, I could not have known it'd be bad!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Well it was essentially a boycott. If people will stop buying games made by them, then publishers will stop hiring them and the company will go bankrupt. So I can understand the motivation for it.

Now, I think the whole scandal is really manufactured. The company goal is basically to provide contractor writers to help with game development. They try to differentiate themselves by claiming that they write content that is inclusive, which can help make games for a wider populace.

The hate though is misdirected. People are claiming that the games are bad, because the company made them bad, when in reality if publisher prefers to hire contractor writers rather than hire their own, they likely don't care about quality and just want to milk the franchise.

I actually had no idea bout this scandal until yesterday, when it was talked by a streamer while playing Cyberpunk 2077. The guy complained how other games are ruined by SweetBaby. What is golden for me is that he said he loves Cyberpunk 2077, that it's very fun game, but in the game you have straight, gay, bi, trans NPC characters. You can even be gay, bi, trans yourself.

The game has loser men, and powerful women (I mean the NUSA president is a women) similarly, you have black characters that are very powerful and honorable, you have a powerful Asian woman in DLC that has skills that you can't surpass. I mean the game is the wokest of woke, yet still "it is fun" for him.

To me it was perfect example that it is all bullshit, and really what makes game great is the effort put in not whether it is woke/anti-woke.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I actually had no idea bout this scandal until yesterday, when it was talked by a streamer while playing Cyberpunk 2077. The guy complained how other games are ruined by SweetBaby. What is golden for me is that he said he loves Cyberpunk 2077, that it’s very fun game, but in the game you have straight, gay, bi, trans NPC characters. You can even be gay, bi, trans yourself.

Notably, Cyberpunk 2077 is not to my knowledge a game Sweet Baby was involved with. So clearly it's not simply anger at non-straight characters existing in games.

I know more people who are angry that a character in a repeated murder mystery visual novel game isn't actually trans like they want him to be than I know people who are angry that characters in games are occasionally trans. Or people upset about Kaine from Nier Gestalt/Replicant in general.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago

what makes game great is the effort put in not whether it is woke/anti-woke

More importantly, the moment someone uses the word "woke" in such a context you already know that:

  • They don't actually know what they're talking about.
  • They are the problem, not the games they're complaining about.
[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago

That website reeks of incel cancer.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago

Sometimes I wish that I could downvote content from my instance.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Fwiw, this is bigots harassing developers and then posting articles like this, avoiding all the details about their bigotry

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago

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.