This documentary was originally released in video form on the 13th of April 2024, it was added to the Entropic Domain in written form on the 4th of April 2025.

Sweet Baby Inc and How Activism Poisons
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Over the last few weeks I heard a specific company be talked about over and over again: Sweet Baby Inc. I didn’t know who they were, what they did, or why people talked about them; All I knew was that they were quite unpopular and frankly, observing everything from the sidelines, a slight dislike for a company I didn’t even know built up.

Fast forward to today, I have a “slightly” more complete view. Lots of people band together on Steam to catalogue all the games Sweet Baby Inc worked on, games magazines made a big stink about the situation and self proclaimed Sweet Baby employees stood true to their namesake and embarrassed themselves online. But why is all of this going on in the first place? And more importantly… What warrants this adversarial back and forth?

Who is our Sweet little Baby?
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First off, we need to understand what kind of company Sweet Baby actually is. Sweet Baby Inc is a game consultation and writing firm that is hired in order to provide feedback, conduct risk assessment on a project, handle the copywriting for advertising or might even write an entire script for a game. Their services are pretty much entirely bound to writing and consultation and they state on their website that they value some things especially highly: Inclusion and representation.

Really, Sweet Baby is an outsourcing company, of which many exist and are utilised throughout the industry. Some do concept art, others even program components for a game, even others specialise in VFX and Sweet Baby happen to write and consult.

Where the perceived problems with the company come into play, is when it comes to the beliefs that are associated with them.

Eventually, a multitude of people online picked up on Sweet Baby Inc and the Steam Curator page cataloguing their games, posting clips, reporting the news surrounding the company and also providing a platform to the boycotters standing against what Sweet Baby is all about, rejecting predominantly progressive messaging built into experiences Sweet Baby was in some way involved in and adamantly protesting against a perceived ideological pressure in the industry.

The Boycott Part 1: Origin and Ideals
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So how did this whole hullabaloo between Sweet Baby and their detractors really kick off? Well, it started with a Brazilian gamer who goes by “Kabrutus”.

In an interview Kabrutus mentioned feeling that games had started to change since his childhood, getting wind of SBI in around 2022, he singled out the release of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, a game SBI had contributed to that had received widespread negative reviews.

In forming SBI Detected Kabrutus took inspiration from the DenuvoGames Steam group, a community formed to list out games that used the DRM software Denuvo, which has been blamed for causing various technical problems, encouraging users to stay away from games that use it, Kabrutus got the idea to form a similar group to discourage people from buying the games Sweet Baby was involved in; Just as the Denuvo group hoped to root out the technical issues that software was causing, Kabrutus was hoping to root out the social attitudes he saw as being inserted into games by Sweet Baby.

These attitudes being performative “wokism”, censorship and ideological pressure, he also saw the company as disrespecting the source material of projects they worked on, the Suicide Squad game giving Batman a death where he was unceremoniously shot in the head instead of something heroic ( a scene that angered many after being leaked before the game’s launch) was an example of this that came to mind, others being the choice to present Poison Ivy as a child instead of how she’s usually shown in other mediums, an adult, often sexualised woman, or to disrespect another DC hero, The Flash, by showing one of the Squad pissing on his corpse after he gets knocked off to the afterlife.

The boycott community got a massive boost after certain SBI employees tried to instigate a harassment campaign against the group, encouraging their followers to mass report the group and Kabrutus personally to Valve, hoping that they would get banned from the Steam platform.

Activism : Allegations of Ideological Pressure
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This backfired massively, as commentators picked up on the story masses of people joined up to the group and began to speak against Sweet Baby, Valve confirmed the group and its founder were going nowhere, the employees and Sweet Baby ended up having to private their accounts instead to avoid the backlash, and the main instigator of the harassment ended up getting suspended by Twitter for breaking the rules.

It was a classic case of the Streisand Effect, rather than criticism towards SBI being silenced many gaming circles, especially with a conservative leaning, became aware of the company and their questionable practices.

Everyone had something to say on the issue already; Asmongold took a break from stealing content to comment on Kim Blaire, the CEO of Sweet Baby Inc…

…In between leeching off of video essays on the subject of course…

A Gundam cosplayer and online opinion-haver covering the Sweet Baby drama, brought up many insightful points in his coverage…

And the likes such as Hero Hei doing extensive Twitter research, or rather, turning on OBS and reading out Twitter headlines for 10 minutes…

And speaking of using OBS, The Quartering is good at that. His entire online career consists of pressing a button, waffling without much direction, and then pressing it again to end a recording.

Of all the videos I have seen on the matter, the opinion piece from Some Ordinary Gamers I think was the best of the bunch, offering a more nuanced perspective on the matter.

To sum this all up: Everyone had something to say. Some of it interesting, much more of the opinions however having an ideological bend to them… ironically. The Narrative around Sweet Baby Inc revolves around a multitude of clips originating from the CEO of the company Kim Belaire, Tweets and Comments made from various confirmed or self proclaimed employees of the company which are less than flattering, and from articles that covered the story culminating in the following interpretation of what Sweet Baby are and do:

“Sweet Baby Inc is a woke propaganda company which forces itself into collaborations with game studios through instrumenting developers to scare higher ups in order to get contracted by studios and to subsequently inject progressive ideas into the games they get to work on. And they make women ugly.”

Of the media used to paint that unfavourable image of Sweet Baby Inc, one clip comes up again and again; A call to action from the CEO of Sweet Baby Inc, instructing developers to terrify marketing people within their companies.

The Co-Founder of Sweet Baby Inc Kim Belair proudly explains the method she uses to force bosses at game studios to censor, alter, and "diversify" game projects she feels are problematic - "Terrify them" aka threaten them with the anger of the cancel culture mob. pic.twitter.com/eFJZeKqSZd
— GamesNosh (@GamesNosh) March 4, 2024

This clip you just saw, everyone took, and ran with the story

Another clip which is less used but still often referenced is one of Kim comparing the main demographic of players - white males - to picky babies.

The Boycott Part 2: What really sways the audience
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From the way the critics talk about Sweet Baby, one could easily get a sense that something sinister is going on here. Sweet Baby employees tried to silence the naysayers after all! Something didn’t feel “right” however and we felt that there was a little more to this story.

When we researched Sweet Baby further we found that the company has been massively misrepresented, and that many of the figures encouraging the boycott either don’t know what they’re talking about or are knowingly misleading people. Maybe SBI’s agenda isn’t anywhere near as scary as it has been presented to be…

Let’s bring up Suicide Squad again as an example, SBI has essentially been dumped with all of the blame for the unpopular story elements in the game, Kabrutus pointed to it as the main reason for him starting the boycott and he claimed that the group was “probably” behind these unpopular twists-

in his defence he did say that these changes only worsened a game that was already poor quality because of its gameplay problems, but he still implied that it was SBI’s influence that ruined the story.

This is a message that was picked up among those supporting the boycott, with some accusing SBI of writing the entire plot, the fact that the game is tonally and visually nothing like its predecessors (the Batman Arkham games) made this an easy assumption to take on, SBI had strong armed their way into the development and poisoned the well.

When we looked into SBI’s role though, a very different picture quickly emerged: Kim Belaire responded to the commentary about Suicide Squad in an interview by denying that the company had been involved in writing the plot, saying that instead Sweet Baby’s role was working on more background narrative design: Things like ads seen in the game world, audio logs and NPC dialogue.

Now, maybe you might say this is just damage control, with the company trying to get off the hook for the game’s failures by throwing its developer Rocksteady under the bus, but an ex-Rocksteady employee who worked on the game came out on social media to confirm Kim’s version of events, pointing out that the story had been written by the same people who worked on the stories of Batman Arkham City and Arkham Knight, Sefton Hill and Ian Ball, and that the story had been ironed out before Sweet Baby even existed as a company.

Other examples of this also came out as the controversy exploded, another game that Sweet Baby had worked on was Alan Wake 2, one of its lead characters, police investigator Saga Anderson, was originally meant to be white, and had been changed to a black character because of SBI’s influence.

While Saga had been portrayed as white in a teaser for the game, its director Kyle Rowley bluntly said that the claims SBI were responsible for her being black in the final product were not true, although SBI did have an influence on Saga’s character development they weren’t the only ones, with her actress Melanie Liburd also being consulted, ultimately Remedy were at the helm and their leads took credit for the character.

Why the character initially appeared as white could be for any number of reasons, maybe they simply hadn’t cast the actor yet and when they found Melanie they decided she was a perfect fit, these sorts of changes can happen in development and it doesn’t have to be for sinister or ideological reasons.

In fact, this isn’t the first time a change like this has been made in a Remedy game, in the game Control the character Fred Langston was originally depicted as black in the concept art, in the final game he’s white.

Another example of these “race swaps” we could point to is a major character from Fallout New Vegas, NCR Ambassador Dennis Crocker, Crocker was originally envisioned as a white character but because of a mix up in the recording sessions the voice actor for the black male characters, Emerson Brooks, ended up reading his lines, Obsidian decided to roll with it and Crocker became black.

Writing isn’t something static, it evolves over time and sometimes early ideas of what a character should be like are changed later, with the finished versions looking little or nothing like the original pitch, sometimes that’s because of purposeful choices and other times it can come from a developer just rolling with what circumstances dropped on their lap.

The problem with all this is unless you have inside knowledge it’s hard to know exactly what dialogue in a game has been worked on in house and what was worked on by outside contractors, all that Kabrutus and his group actually identify is if SBI have worked on a game in any capacity, but what that process actually looks like is a very open ended question, some games they’ve worked on have been almost entirely written by them, while for other projects the company’s role is very small.

This ambiguity has been used by critics of SBI as a licence to blame them for all sorts of problems, because the claims are unfalsifiable, who can really know if it’s true or not? So much or innocent until proven guilty.

But that’s the thing, we actually do know, in the few examples we have where SBI has been blamed by critics for a specific complaint, like Saga’s skin colour or Suicide Squad’s storyline, the critics have been wrong, the company has essentially been made into a scapegoat for the vibes critics are unhappy with while these groups of people who are so sure that “they can just tell” actually can’t, even Kabrutus would agree that SBI was scapegoated to some degree.

But it’s not just the company’s involvement in certain projects that has been distorted, it turns out that the entire M.O. of the company has been badly mischaracterised by their critics. Let us bring up that clip from earlier again…

The Co-Founder of Sweet Baby Inc Kim Belair proudly explains the method she uses to force bosses at game studios to censor, alter, and "diversify" game projects she feels are problematic - "Terrify them" aka threaten them with the anger of the cancel culture mob. pic.twitter.com/eFJZeKqSZd
— GamesNosh (@GamesNosh) March 4, 2024

While a majority of commentators online stuck to this clip from Twitter, which can be easily seen by how the clip was bitcrushed further and further the more it was reposted, or had an uncharacteristically low quality when compared to the original when used in news style videos, some claimed to have gone the extra mile and seemed to have watched the entire presentation.

This Donut right here eventually admitted in a follow up video that he stopped watching the presentation after a mention of “Catcher in the Rye” which is mere minutes into the talk and in the end seriously suggests to hold some form of integrity in covering the story.

ItsAGundam : shut the fuck up.

Anyways, we decided to delve deeper and managed to find Kim Belairs full presentation at GDC, the Game Developers Conference and decided to just give it a watch!

Let us bring up the before shown 20 second clip of Kim Belair instructing developers to instil fear one last time.

The Co-Founder of Sweet Baby Inc Kim Belair proudly explains the method she uses to force bosses at game studios to censor, alter, and "diversify" game projects she feels are problematic - "Terrify them" aka threaten them with the anger of the cancel culture mob. pic.twitter.com/eFJZeKqSZd
— GamesNosh (@GamesNosh) March 4, 2024

This is where the clip ends. Sounds bad doesn’t it? However when continuing her point…

…The context suddenly changes. But wait, this goes even further! Several minutes before the “Terrify them” phrase is uttered, Kim reveals an important aspect of her character, even labelling it a fun fact.

And now what was spun as a slip of the mask, unveiling a shadowy cabal of puppet masters pulling all the strings behind the scenes, turned into a Marketer communicating to a group of developers how they should approach and talk to Marketer type people. The Conspiracy theory presents Kim as instructing developers to threaten their higher ups in order to get SBI contracted, however what Kim was actually saying is that in order to get more funding from marketing, you gotta make a good point and you have to be convincing.

Now when we look at how the clip spread and what was omitted, it reframes how one looks at this boycott. Instead of seeing a group of gamers fed up with the enshittification of the medium they adore so much and finding who is responsible for it, we see a horde of ideologues influencing the masses by using fear tactics. Sweet Baby are going to make your protagonists weak, they will make female characters look ugly and they will inject propaganda into your games in service of political correctness, and by the way, the jews may be behind this too. While even most boycotters would scratch their head at the last one, we did see examples of people linking Sweet Baby to some form of anti semitic conspiracy without extraordinary evidence to boot.

HOW @SweetBabyInc OPERATES
A brief guide to how the corporation that ruined videogames and put thousands of developers out of jobs operates.
Perhaps Kim Belair @BagelofDeath and her bullies employees (victimizing cowards) would be interested in a lot of.@kabrutusrambo @Grummz pic.twitter.com/DXaGgohU3L
— 五十嵐明 (@sodosiraso16g) March 4, 2024

This 20 second clip did an inconceivable amount of damage. Everyone ran with it and so far we could find only one instance of a person on Twitter correcting the record in an attempt to put the clip into context. The very vast majority of reposts put words into Kim Belair’s mouth and some clips were worse than others. Take this Japanese tweet as an example, which translated what Kim said and sandwiched “political correctness” in parentheses somewhere into the translation. Political Correctness didn’t come up even once during Kim Belair’s GDC talk, the translator is further poisoning the well.

日本のゲーム業界やアニメ業界は大丈夫か？これがハリウッドやディズニーをポリコレ化した方法だ。SweetBabyIncの共同創設者であるKimBelairは、問題があると感じるゲームプロジェクトあれば上司に検閲、変更、多様化させるために会社を怖がらせる方法を説明している。製造拠点は海外に置くなというこ… pic.twitter.com/jVAUvEopEs
— 髙安カミユ（ミジンコまさ） (@martytaka777) March 6, 2024

Other reposts shared longer clips, but put a screenshot on top of the video of the dictionary definition of “extortion”. Again, poisoning the well by priming the viewer to expect the very worst in the following video.

There are more examples of this clip being used of course, but what really sealed the deal was when streamers and YouTubers started amplifying those clips and the narrative attached to them. Some of these creators aren’t really driven by ideology but run with the story with no further research for the juicy drama money, such as the professional YouTube video impressions thief Asmongold, others fostered a specific kind of audience who are especially receptive to anti “woke” messaging, which is most definitely the case for ItsAGundam and The Quartering.

The Quartering’s content is interesting for how poorly researched it is. Every video of his is a scroll through Twitter and reading an article or two, of which typically none challenge his views on a subject. Meanwhile he adamantly exclaims how he is tired of politics infesting his games, being seemingly oblivious to his own distinctly political attitudes towards entertainment media, especially when faced with the prospect of members of the opposite sex crawling into his sports games. In his own words; Middle grounds can be found, but a women’s league in his sports game is crossing the line.

What is especially -excuse my french- retarded when it comes to the prospect of politics in games being bad or them infesting experiences in order to influence the audiences is that every facet related to the human experience is intertwined with the things we create and consume. A game without politics is seen relatively often, but I would argue that political, societally critical and ideological game experiences are a dime a dozen and many of which are beloved by audiences. Experiences such as BioShock or Disco Elysium have blatant political messaging, while experiences like Fallout New Vegas or Sid Meier’s Civilisation 5 could be considered ideological and political sandboxes. In both of the latter examples the player can even directly explore what autocracy and rampant militarism really looks like in action.

Many past games go balls deep into exploring ideology and politics, hell what faction is best for the Mojave is debated amongst Fallout fans to this day, and many boycotters including their leader Kabrutus, have played Fallout New Vegas before. By the way, the game is filled to the brim with homosexuals too and with women who hold some form of power in the world. Don’t tell mister Quartering.

Really, a game that features an option to set the players pronouns to “they” or a game that features women’s leagues alongside the more popular mens leagues in sports, are far less egregious examples of rampant political exploration or influence in a game when compared to games such as the Fallout series which explore themes of mass extermination, subjugation or the pseudoscientific concept of race and racial purity and so much more.

Politics or ideology aren’t the problem, it’s the politics or ideology which The Quartering and his followers disagree with, which allows them to blow any messaging they don’t like out of proportion, which they otherwise likely wouldn’t have if they consumed the media they found interesting without influencers telling them how woke they supposedly are. This mindset facilitates a witch hunt the likes of which we are observing at this instant as “guilt by association” thrives with such a poorly thought out ideology. It doesn’t even matter if SBI even worked on the story or not, “they are woke so they just have to go broke”.

A common comparison across videos from multiple influencers, is one to Feminist Frequency or more specifically Anita Sarkeesian.

The other YouTuber I want to put on the spotlight, ItsAGundam, titled Sweet Baby Incorporated “The Successful Feminist Frequency” and he in my opinion did far more disgusting things in order to misrepresent Sweet Baby Inc.

Unlike The Quartering, ItsAGundam sought out the presentations Kim Belair held and made it seem like he watched through them, pretending to provide some form of valuable commentary on the subject, cherry picking clips to misrepresent his ideological enemy and strawman essentially everything Kim Belair said. Remember, ItsAGundam admitted to this! No matter what she says, the worst possible interpretation one could think up is extrapolated from what Kim said. Take the story of how the company found it’s name for instance:

This is the worst possible interpretation you could take on after listening to Kim Belair recounting how Sweet Baby got its name. ItsAGundam concludes that Sweet Baby condescends to their collaborators and only wants to work with people they can easily manipulate, when in reality the company’s name and Kim Belair’s intention of only working with “Sweet Babies” is meant in the most endearing way imaginable.

Additionally, in an interview with InclusionFX Kim elaborates on what kind of people she loves to work with, even putting the people on the top of the list of priorities, much rather having an OK project to work on with an exceptional team instead of working on a phenomenal game but with a horrible set of collaborators.

ItsAGundam also repeatedly dissuades his audience from informing themselves and watching through Kim Belairs presentations by labelling those talks as “An Origin Story noone asked for” or the GDC talk being “Boring and self aggrandising” while not having watched the full presentations himself. On top of this he showcased multiple snippets from the talks showcased in his video and always assumes the worst in regards to what Kim could mean with what she says, and he completely skips over statements in his coverage that he likely would agree with. This person, like many other people at this moment, is not covering the subject in good faith. What doesn’t help either is that his messaging on what SBI actually do or how much influence they actually have, is just as inaccurate as what a majority of influencers parrot regarding the subject, further implying that SBI is the bringer of all evil.

The Boycott Part 3: Commonalities between “the Woke” and “the Broke”
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If this video couldn’t convince you so far, we’ve got more up our sleeves. While we recommend you to watch the presentation in full, we know you are likely not going to do that, so we’re going to show you some clips from the GDC talk that these culture war grifters didn’t talk about, and when we do you’ll quickly see why.

Try to listen past some of the words she used or metaphors employed, and actually concentrate on what Kim is talking about. What you may see when conducting this experiment, is that what Kim is presenting and talking about, actually is fairly reasonable and you may even find yourself agreeing to some of the ideas proposed.

Let’s start with what Kim thinks about the dreaded cis, white males, she has been characterised as a racist, hating white men in particular and talking down to them, viewing them as nothing more than insolent children, when in reality Kim was talking about a publishers view on what the target demographic of a game wants and thinks like, while advocating for the average white guy’s intelligence and readiness to explore new perspectives.

She argued this by pointing to the fact that she had related to numerous protagonists that were white men, if she as a woman of colour could do that, why could a white person not relate to the stories of people from other backgrounds?

That’s where the inclusion in diversity and inclusion comes in, in the mind of a person like Kim these sorts of stories are not designed to kick white people or men out of the club, they’re designed to broaden the club’s membership, this might be a good time to point out that the COO of the company, David Bédard, happens to be a white man.

A big contributor to the besmirchment of Sweet Baby as a company, is the idea that Sweet Baby shoe horns minorities into any game they touch, ruining them in the process. Since many detractors claim to advocate for a more “sensible” inclusion of diversity, but here we can see that Kim’s idea of diversity might be the more sensible one!

To give you an idea of what the “diversity and inclusion” Kim promotes actually looks like, we can bring up an example she introduced at her GDC talk. When being asked to consult on a dating simulator, a scene they were working on was the protagonist being asked by their date what their ex was like, with essentially 3 options:

They were nice, but it didn’t work out
I don’t really want to talk about it
My Ex was a monster

These would cause positive, neutral or negative reactions respectively, with the “my ex was a monster” option causing the date to react with disgust, calling the character immature. Kim suggested that this line, although designed for a protagonist that could be a man or a woman, was one tied to gender stereotypes, reminding her of the image of a man having to deal with a “crazy ex girlfriend”, a stereotype often played off for laughs.

Kim noted that for a woman, the more likely meaning of a saying like this would be a serious recounting of abuse, she suggested that instead of the date just reacting negatively to the response, it would be more interesting if the date probed further, asking the protagonist if they meant it seriously or if it was just a joke, imagining a heart to heart moment where a woman who had gone through that kind of abuse could see herself in the character.

Although this suggestion from Kim comes from a desire to make women’s experiences more accounted for, it would add nuance across the board, for example imagine this version of the conversation as the male protagonist, he’s on a date and the date asks him about his ex, he calls her a monster and when probed says he’s serious, that he’s talking about some kind of genuine abuse or trauma that he went through.

That could shine a light on an instance of a woman abusing a man in a relationship, which is something that a lot of the time isn’t really touched on; Be honest, if you think of a straight relationship that involves abuse, you would probably jump to the man being the abuser.

This more nuanced conversation could show that these sorts of things are human experiences, there’s no box for victim and abuser that one gender fits in and the other doesn’t, and it could also be an interesting case of character development, relaying this negative experience with an ex could either piss off your date for making a stupid joke or, if you were serious, have them become more empathetic towards you.

Compare that to the original version of the dialogue, where you playing as a man might sincerely pick that answer, only to have the woman brush you off insensitively, holding it against you for bringing up a bad experience, which of these versions sounds more reasonable when you put it like that? We would say it sounds like quite a reasonable suggestion for a change.

But that’s not what the company Kim was consulting decided to do, what happened instead?

So, contrary to the stereotype of the permanently offended SJW who just wants to censor media, Kim was actually frustrated that the approach she encountered was to just cut; A segment that appeared to be “problematic”.

As a narrative designer she wanted to make characters more interesting, and her ideas were about having more complex characters that didn’t just conform to easy archetypes, doing that by improving rather than removing story elements.

Put simply, the real world is a nuanced place, people are complex and don’t just fit into easy boxes, and representing that is something she was interested in doing.

The stumbling block here is that while the company might prefer to be making positive suggestions about what to add, rather than negative suggestions about what to remove, the companies that they work for will have the final say.

This means that SBI has to shoulder the risk of judgement on the projects they contribute to, but they don’t have the creative control to balance that out. As a company filled with mouths that need feeding, this less than ideal relationship is one Sweet Baby has to put up with, they cannot afford to pass up contracts with a company just because their ideas won’t always be taken on board.

Another example she pointed to for this was Mass Effect, which she mentioned as the first time she had made a black character in a game with character customisation, she was excited by the introduction to the game where her black Commander Shepard was introduced to the Marine Jacob Taylor, what she was excited by was the fact that Taylor didn’t fit into some box of what a black character “should be”, and neither did Shepard.

This seems to be pretty much exactly what promoters of “sensible” diversity would be enthusiastic about too, black characters who aren’t there to promote some agenda, their blackness isn’t even relevant to the narrative, their actual role is getting tangled up in the military and political intrigue of the game’s world.

Focusing on interesting characters as the goal, rather than vapid tokenism, is something she directly mentioned in the talk, but of course if you were only shown very select, split second clips out of context, that’s an impression you would completely lose, with Belair being cast as encouraging these stereotypes that she very clearly spoke against.

In an interview with Kotaku, she specifically voiced annoyance that Sweet Baby was being misrepresented as a “DEI company”, a company dedicated solely to dealing with diversity issues, and that the team’s accomplishments were being tied to their identities as part of marginalised groups rather than their skills as writers.

This frustration with tokenism isn’t just something exclusive to Belair, another Sweet Baby affiliate, Neha Patel, posted about the anxiety the phenomenon causes, giving her a kind of imposter syndrome for all her accomplishments, wondering if they’re a product of recognition for genuine talent or just someone trying to tick a box for the sake of optics.

And on the sentiment of “adding to” rather than “subtracting from”, this is something that COO David Bédard shares with Belair. Removing all the offence or edge from an experience comes to a detriment to the experience, and David even spelled it out directly by describing an inoffensive experience as “kind of boring”.

These don’t read as the words of some kind of out of touch pink or blue haired loony leftists, they come off more as the words of people who want to be seen as people and tell stories of characters that go beyond that box to be checked.

A common thread that Sweet Baby critics follow, is the genuine and unadulterated disinterest they harbour in anything their victim actually talks about, completely missing out on much common ground that the narrative design company and upset gamers could share. After watching hours worth of videos, reading various tweets and articles, we could discern that these values Sweet Baby Inc is criticised for violating, they in fact stand for… Only that tragically no one is willing or capable of listening.

The Boycott Part 4: How Ideologues Bend Reality
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Now it does have to be said that the company doesn’t help themselves sometimes. Despite Belair criticising the reductionary approaches of things like “sensitivity reading”, it is a service they mention front and centre on their website, you could be forgiven for misunderstanding their role as purely dedicated to DEI issues at first, rather than the whole spectrum of narrative design, and a lot of the company’s detractors evidently did make this mistake.

Language is another divisor that is very important to be aware of as ideologues perk up instantly when they get to hear certain words. For the people that push their conservative agenda or the ones that reciprocate it, hearing talk of “Cisgender” “White Males”, “representation”, “Diversity” or more specific terms such as “Microaggression” makes them jump to conclusions fast. In her talk Kim used all of them.

These factors result in a terminal optics problem that conservatives pounce on: presenting ideas that are often fairly reasonable as absolutely insane, an issue that progressives seemingly can’t shake.

In fairness, this was a talk Kim gave to a group of mostly like minded game developers, not something she expected to be blasted, out of context, to a far broader audience, and when you focus on what she actually has to say rather than picking over certain terms you can see that she was actually a very clear and insightful speaker, the fact that her detractors had to grab the tiniest snippets possible to misrepresent her shows that.

During my research on the Sweet Baby controversy, a friend of the channel was quite interested about writing on the subject too and I thought there would be no better way to include his thoughts on the matter than an Opinion column closing out the video, presenting my guests perspective on the topic and then closing out with my own thoughts on the matter. Welcoming: Parallax!

Opinion Column: Parallax
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Cycles of Outrage, Ad Nauseum
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There’s a reason why this story about Sweet Baby Inc. blew up the way it did. We live in an age where short, bite-sized content is ubiquitous on the Internet. Distilling content into this form factor is convenient for many of us, especially if you’re a student or a working professional like me. But because of how gratifying and easy it is to consume content at such breakneck speed, we quickly find ourselves engrossed in consuming more and more of it for hours on end.

As a result, many of us suffer from information overload — and, in turn, have shorter attention spans. Anything that doesn’t immediately catch our attention or provide us with an instant dopamine hit will get lost in the noise — a nightmare for journalists and internet influencers alike trying to make a living from their work. This quandary led many of them down a dark path of obsessing with min-maxing the bare minimum of what would get the most clicks to their content. Eventually, they figured out that the best way to attract massive traffic to one’s own platform was by manufacturing outrage.

Sweet Baby Inc. isn’t the only company that received undue flak from reactionaries with an axe to grind, with equally reactionary journalists and internet influencers cheering them on. We keep hearing outrageous stories every week from these same journalists and internet influencers, peddling the idea that someone or something is conspiring to distort and destroy everything people love by making it “woke” — black robes and all. The audiences were told to resist and fight against “political correctness” found oh-so abundantly in modern media — a disease spread around by crazy “corpo-shill ideologues” forcing their agenda onto others. Sometimes, if they feel like it, they will cite articles or tweets to support their claims, showing everyone the sheer severity of the problem at hand.

But more often than not, I have found that whenever the topic of “political correctness” gets brought up by reactionaries, they mostly talk about… The inclusion of minorities in video games, more accessibility options for players, female characters not “pretty,” “busty” and “curvy” anymore, male protagonists being portrayed as “effeminate” and “weak,” female characters having “too much muscle,” and, uh… “fucking pronouns” as proof that corporations are conspiring against “normal people” like them.

I can’t stress this point enough: these were all farcical controversies that are not only inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but it contributed very little value to the discussion of the current state of gaming today.

Take “forced diversity,” for example. Why does this point get brought up every time black characters are introduced in video games? If “bad writing” is their main gripe against the “forced” inclusion of black characters in video games, they should know that “bad writing” can happen in any game regardless of the character’s skin color. If the writing is bad, the story will be bad, and no amount of JC Dentons and The Postal Dudes in the game will fix that for them. Contrary to what these reactionaries would like you to believe, good writing can exist independently from the pawns driving the narrative of the story forward, and all this bitching about “forced diversity” is just a roundabout way of saying that they’ve simply paid for bad games.

But these reactionary journalists and internet influencers don’t seem to care about these nuances. Most of them only concern themselves with chasing clout and the almighty dollar, which could explain why they can’t stop talking about culture wars on their respective platforms. It doesn’t matter if the things they say are based on flimsy evidence, unsubstantiated rumors, or worse, making shit up. Nor do they care if they’ve driven multiple innocent people off the Internet in the name of “accountability.” They will do everything in their power to keep this cycle of outrage going, and they do this by conditioning their communities to be in a perpetual state of outrage, feeding into their learned habit of only finding relief in their favorite YouTubers validating their fears and concerns.

It also didn’t help that some of the more well-meaning journalists and YouTubers that they also followed did not properly research some of the topics they covered. The story of Sweet Baby Inc. happens to be one of them. In this case, these journalists and YouTubers ended up echoing the same disinformation perpetuated by reactionaries to their audiences, lending credence to the lies the latter worked so hard to sell and entrenching their audiences deeper into this siege mentality against the “wokes” and the progressives for longer. Ivan Pavlov would be proud.

One of the things these reactionaries have instilled in the minds of many is the idea that if others enjoy games as they do, it compromises the things they already have. But that’s not true, especially in the case of Sweet Baby Inc. It’s clear at this point that Kim Belair wasn’t going around “censoring video games,” visiting their offices, and pointing a firearm to their heads to “impose her woke politics.” In fact, she wants to flesh out the “problematic” parts of the characters and their stories more, making them complex and interesting for a change.

Unfortunately, many of her ideas get shot down by some gaming companies that only care about making the safest, inoffensive slop imaginable to appease their money-hungry shareholders. In doing so, it makes the narrative of the games they’ve made so predictable, vapid, and boring. For that, I respect Kim for putting in the effort to remedy this issue, and I think a lot of people can find plenty of common ground with her had they listened to what she said in full.

It’s a shame that, as far as I can tell, a lot of people had already internalized this misguided belief that Kim Belair is just another “irrational woke-a-rati activist,” and whatever that comes out of her mouth can no longer be trusted.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Reactionaries live and thrive off of negativity by galvanizing anger and hate toward their made-up boogeyman every day of the week. The point is not to be right. Being right means you need to know the facts, learn the reasons for what and why things happen, and then defend your position using those facts and reasons when challenged. But all they can do is lie and misrepresent the facts on the table, something we have been made painfully aware of the second these reactionaries took this out-of-context clip of Kim Belair’s speech to rile everyone up for their own self-interest. Some of you watching this video may disagree with everything I have to say, and that’s okay.

But if there’s one thing I wanted you to take away from all of this, it is that you are your own person. You have the agency to think for yourselves, to deduce whether the information presented is credible or not. You don’t need these reactionaries telling you what to believe and how to react to what’s happening around you. I don’t blame you for harboring anger and resentment towards those who tried to ruin your hobby, believing their every word. Hell, I used to be that way, too. I was being led around by the nose by these reactionaries — some of whom are featured in this video you’re watching right now. I harassed people — people, who I was told were horrible and did terrible things toward others who got in their way of pushing their “political agenda.”

Of course, they insisted that they’ve never created or encouraged a harassment campaign towards anyone they’ve made videos on. All they did was “report on the news” and “shed light on what was going on”… by dramatizing and exaggerating events that unfolded, and painted the person worse than they really are, almost like they were trying to push people to feel and act a certain way.

I thought I was doing the right thing. After all, a sizable portion of the fanbase I used to be a part of was doing it, too. When these reactionaries made videos denigrating multiple women who called out one prominent voice actor for being a sex pest all those years ago, I joined in with the rest of the mob, jeering them for being insane feminists, for trying to bring down an honest man out of jealousy. It wasn’t until later that I realized this “honest man” I defended so fervently is a certified sex pest, like they say he is — with all the evidence laid bare in front of my eyes. His name is Vic Mignogna, and in case you’re wondering, he recently lost his appeal for the third time in his defamation case against Funimation, Monica Rial, Jamie Marchi, and Ron Toye last January.

This is why I’m very passionate about discussing these reactionary grifters in the first place. For lack of a better term, they fucked us all over, and I’m not letting them have their way with what they’re doing with the recent Sweet Baby Inc. fiasco right now.

The ones who ruined our hobbies are not people like Kim Belair and David Bedard. It’s the gaming corporations. They’re the ones responsible for the massive layoffs in gaming companies for the past few years, exploiting the remaining developers by overworking them up to seventy hours per week over the course of several months (often uncompensated) to meet unreasonable deadlines. This “crunch culture” got so bad, that a lot of game developers suffer sleep deprivation, depression, anxiety, and heart complications, among many others.

Gaming corporations are also the ones who shamelessly introduced predatory microtransactions and live services into their games, and yet they have the audacity to hike the prices of their base games to USD 70 and call it a “quadruple-A game,” because they’re beholden to the shareholders that only cared whether they can make the line go up. All of this, while their board executives get paid top dollar doing absolutely nothing about the sexual harassment cases under their watch.

Have you ever wondered why you have heard so little about these issues until now? It’s because we’ve been constantly bombarded with, again, pointless culture war topics by the likes of Asmongold, TheQuartering, ItsAGundam, Discount Store Linguini, Griffin Gaming, and more. Every time they do this, they always distract us from focusing our discontent on the corporations for the reasons mentioned earlier, opting instead to tackle trite topics such as pronouns and trans people. This is all by design.

They don’t have the slightest interest in seeing the horrid conditions within the gaming industry today improve, because then, they would have nothing to complain about. It’s easier to just attribute the quality degradation of games to “woke politics,” because manufacturing fake outrage always sells. That is the reality we live in, and I’m afraid it’s going to stay this way for years to come.

Concluding: Opinion Column - Cheecken
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What happens now? Evidently the boycott will continue to rage on and people will continue fighting an enemy they don’t understand.

We tried doing our part, hell I sent emails or direct messages to over a dozen contacts, including almost every company that worked with Sweet Baby Inc, various individuals working at those companies, Sweet Baby Inc themselves, the leader of the boycott Kabrutus, etc etc in the hopes that we could gain the ultimate behind the scenes view on the subject and play the interview clips against each other in order to make the most thorough video on the subject that we wished already existed. This ideal scenario evidently didn’t happen. Kabrutus politely rejected us, and we didn’t hear back from anyone else and i can’t really blame anyone. Kabrutus is swamped with interview requests at this moment and is kickstarting his streaming career, while one moderator of a development studio I contacted gave me a rundown of why the studio wasn’t interested in talking to me: There was fear in a potential interview only digging a deeper trench, which given the current happenings, is a fear I harbour myself.

We already see new narratives come out of nowhere, with more interviews within articles being misrepresented - Sweet Baby seemingly are not able to catch a break. I am a bit disappointed in not landing any interviews, but hey, to the people I contacted: My offer still stands!

We all love videogames, we are very passionate about them and I would personally say that the videogame medium, when handled correctly, stands at the peak of entertainment media as a whole, with a really good game being able to make us laugh, bring us to tears or influence us in much deeper ways, such as aspiring to learn new languages, help reform our beliefs or bring us to try out new things we saw in games. Just how many people got into skateboarding because of Skate 3? How many people became history buffs thanks to games such as Mount and Blade or the Civilisation series?

We all understand how much of an influence games are on our lives and we wouldn’t want someone to ruin this medium for us, however it is important to be mindful of what you are really combatting and what the end result of your actions will be, irrespective of the intended outcome. “Hand auf’s Herz”, do you really believe that you are effectively fighting DEI companies and leftward political pressure in the medium by instrumenting half truths, lying through omission and guilt by association tactics? Do you think you best fight what you believe to be ideological extremists by accepting the help from ideological extremists on the opposing end of the pendulum swing? What good can come out of what people call a “culture war” when a vast majority of the horde, including the president, generals and lieutenants up the chain of command, don’t have a single fucking clue about what their enemy actually does? I understand the genesis of the boycott, the perceived enshittification of games and the want to make things better than they are at this moment, but this is not the way to get what you want and here is why: You are proving a stereotype right which the likes of Kim Belair believed to not even exist in the first place. You are acting like the picky baby!

Media is made by everyone, for everyone and while I myself have experienced some games being a little too cringe inducing or parroting ideas I disagreed with I either just kept playing or decided to not play the game anymore depending on how severe the case really was, but often times when I played the game anyhow, it still provided me much enjoyment. Life is Strange is such an example, that game just didn’t appeal to me and almost everything about it was jarring in some way or form, but I still found enjoyment out of it… even if unintended by the developers.

Not to say that you should keep playing games that are annoying to you, but rather that some of the issues you may see in a game are really not that big of a deal. I mean, it’s case specific of course but what really makes everything harder here in terms of finding the actual line for many of you viewers, is that some donuts like Mr A-Political think women’s leagues in sports is going too far already.

I think far more important enemies to tackle, are predatory monetisation schemes, pre order bonuses, games having 5 different flavours of deluxe editions, giant companies purchasing studios left right and centre and then dissolving them due to embracing too many of them at once and multiplayer games that run on centralised server structures which are pointless to buy in the first place as they are most definitely gonna die. Gaming right now in many ways is cancer, and outsourcing companies, at least in my eyes, are the least of our problems… especially when considering that third parties hold ZERO power over the entities that hired them in the first place.

Would I make use of a company like Sweet Baby Inc? Not at all really. My videos, such as this one, are often collaborative pieces or written by myself entirely and I believe that I know what is best for my own productions in the video realm, however I wouldn’t discount a service such as Sweet Babies’ here. Quite a few of the guys working there have much experience in the industry and their consulting can lead to quite interesting insights which you yourself might not consider in the first place. A lower budget version of what Sweet Baby does, can also be done by consulting with friends or other peers you are close to. Hey how is the audio balancing? You think this scene looks like shit? Is this segment boring or Gucci? Consulting in itself isn’t a problem. Don’t want a service like that? Just don’t ask for help then!

But back to what this video really is about - the Boycott - You might wonder why this production didn’t heavily go into the journalist that wrote the Kotaku piece, the founder of Sweet Baby Inc Detected or the Employees of Sweet Baby which instructed people to harass Kabrutus; The answer is, many of those tangential points would have distracted from what our message with this production really is, so I will be addressing these things now!

Chris Kindred unequivocally kicked the hornet’s nest. If Chris didn’t instruct people to report the SBI Detected curator page, and to report Kabrutus’ profile for good measure too, the Streisand Effect would have been completely circumvented, no one except for a small minority would have given much of a shit about SBI and this entire sharade wouldn’t have escalated to this embarrassment that we call a culture war.

People have a close eye on you Chris, and Kindred, if you happen to watch this video right now… just shut up! Please just shut up! People are on your ass right now and now even Elon Musk is throwing shade towards the company you work for for something you have said online, just please zip it if you care about Sweet Baby, please!

Games magazines didn’t holistically cover this story. While Sweet Baby Inc are victims of a smear campaign predominantly due to the spread of misinformation, thanks to loudmouth employees who thought it was a great idea to silence their detractors the company itself was a bad bad Baby. No statements from the company denouncing the employees actions were issued, nor was anyone fired, nor did outlets such as PC Gamer just call a harassment campaign a harassment campaign, this gave ideologues such as The Quartering ample ammunition in order to spread their narrative far and wide.

Idiots who are tangentially connected to Sweet Baby Inc, such as the Kotaku journalist or the woman who only hires black people for her game, are distractions and not really proof of anything. Their racist actions or statements ought to be called out, however it’s best to stay focussed and not lump someone like Alyssa Mercante together with someone like Kim Belair, who as far as my research is concerned, never uttered a racist statement.

Race does not exist. The white man, the black man or the yellow man, technically don’t exist and we shouldn’t play in the racial ballpark all together if at all possible as the concept is rooted in falsehoods. Making an effort to hire anyone BUT people with white skin or implying that white skinned people cannot be discriminated against, are very different attitudes to what Kim Belair has advocated for thus far, addressing and combatting biases. Alyssa Mercante and Dani Lalonders said racist shit, but please consider carefully if their racist statements really correlate to Sweet Baby’s leadership.

And lastly, Kabrutus you still don’t even have a shred of an idea of what you are fighting against and I got really tired, really fast listening to your interview with The Quartering when the whole song and dance about “merely informing consumers” came up. Drop the bullshit, the curator page’s only purpose is to dissuade people from buying SBI affiliated games, if the curator page really was informational in nature only, you would have tagged your curations as “informational” in the first place.

However I want to give credit where credit is due. Kabrutus has been quite resistant to getting bought by his interviewers. When concluding the interview, The Quartering tried to goad Kabrutus into accepting payments or steam gifts from his fans, which Kabrutus aptly deflected. Kabrutus also was on top of his community, locking Steam discussions when they were getting too spicy and after “infiltrating” the discord server to see for myself how the interactions there were, I observed the moderators being on top of their game when it came to cracking down on malicious behaviour, and Kabrutus himself even posted an announcement pleading for everyone to cease the harassment of others. He may not have much of an idea about what Sweet Baby does, or that he attracted a less than favourable audience of people to his cause, but his heart seems to be in the right place.

So there you go, all my cards are laid out on the table and I hope that if you decide to give us shit, to keep our views in mind. If there is anything to take away from this, I would say that you should maybe just think for yourself and try to engage with some of what the people you don’t like are saying. I think while a majority of boycotters have no idea what they are doing, I think the steam curator page has a right to exist, and naturally if you don’t like a company and want to skip out on certain games because said company was involved… then keep doing that! You have a right to express yourself and show your discontent, just as someone like myself can point out that some of the anger is misdirected or based on misrepresentations.

As Kim Belair said herself; If you are gonna come for anyone, at least come correct, don’t be loud and wrong!

Sources
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Article about the harassment against SBI detected, streisand effect: https://nichegamer.com/sweet-baby-employees-incite-harassment-campaign-against-steam-curator/

Out of context clip https://twitter.com/Phasmatis75/status/1765971475448635459

Asmongold Clip Sweet Baby Inc CEO Is Nuts..

Hero Hei https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igiwrsWe7L8

Some Ordinary Gamers Sweet Baby Inc Is Awful…

GDC talk of Kim Now You See Me: Representation as Innovation

Kim Belair Interview InclusionFX Inclusion FX #5 - Kim Belair

Eurogamer on SBI: https://www.eurogamer.net/spider-man-alan-wake-ridiculous-fishing-devs-speak-up-in-support-of-consultancy-studio-sweet-baby-inc

Kotaku Interview: https://kotaku.com/sweet-baby-inc-consulting-games-alan-wake-2-dei-1851312428

Forbes - Ex-Rocksteady dev clarifies SBI did not decide the story for Suicide Squad, it was made by the same people who made the story for the Arkham games: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/02/12/ex-rocksteady-dev-shoots-down-suicide-squad-kill-the-justice-league-story-theory/

Quartering Interview with Kabrutus and Grummz clips
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The Quartering talks about Sensitivity readings plaguing novels too: Sweet Baby Inc Detected Founder & WOW Developer Mark Kern!

Kabrutus gets asked about the origin of SBIDetected: Sweet Baby Inc Detected Founder & WOW Developer Mark Kern!

Kabrutus on Suicide Squad, “Character interactions probably on SBI” (killing Batman, presenting Poison Ivy as a child, pissing on the Flash): Sweet Baby Inc Detected Founder & WOW Developer Mark Kern! (question leads in) https://youtu.be/RTKU2i3OVVQ?t=1284 (Suicide Squad answer)

Sexy characters gaslighting porn Quartering: Sweet Baby Inc Detected Founder & WOW Developer Mark Kern!

Does kabrutus want to be a content creator? Sweet Baby Inc Detected Founder & WOW Developer Mark Kern!

Does Kabrutus want to expand to other lists of consulting firms
https://youtu.be/RTKU2i3OVVQ?t=1961

Kotaku Piece commentary
https://youtu.be/RTKU2i3OVVQ?t=2051

Quartering is all about diversity and has no idea about what SBI are even about: Sweet Baby Inc Detected Founder & WOW Developer Mark Kern!

The Sports game thing with women (he thinks putting them in the game is extremism, not the middle ground) https://youtu.be/RTKU2i3OVVQ?t=3199

Asmongold interviewing kabrutus “they are kind of the scapegoat” I Talked To The Creator of “Sweet Baby Inc. Detected”

Asmongold curious about Kabrutus stance on Sweetbaby inc JUST consulting https://youtu.be/iFrwMVdLLDM?t=952