group offers diversity inclusion consulting, whatever that means
It usually means ensuring a lot of small details. For example if you have a native american character, they’d make sure you do not randomly pick a culture that doesn’t fit what the character does or their background, that you don’t show some non-native stereotypes, that you don’t idolize them like in stories unless your specific story calls for that, etc etc.
You’re supposed to work with consulting companies like these when you don’t have people who can judge this on your own team, because it’s so easy to get so many details wrong. Of course it’d be easier if your team already knows how to do it, sure. But if you can’t, then it’s the right step to get someone external who can help you not make a joke out of a character. Again, unless they’re suppsoed to be a joke.
this only exists because companies can benefit from it by getting there ISG score higher because they can say they put diversity in a game. normally consultants where for a specific topic like for guns or history or a culture but sweet baby only does superficial things and represent themselves as experts when there just in marketing no expert in anything to do with the game.
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.
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.
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.
It has a "do not recommend" next to each game on the list, and it's used for people to review bomb games and cry about this company on the Steam forums.
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
provided sensitivity reading for Alan Wake 2 and Goodbye Volcano High, narrative and character consultation “with a focus on representation” for God of War: Ragnarok, story consultation for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and script-writing duties (including cutscenes and banter) for Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.
Stinkers? All of these are pretty popular titles...
The aspect that's getting lost in all this is that the curator has basically put up a hit list of games for people to review bomb just for associating with a company. The curator has no evidence on the level of involvement SBI had with the game but they don't recommend the game based on them being involved at all.
They have taken something small and weaponised it so now it's harming game devs. No one has any evidence on how SBI were involved with any of the games they've listed on their website beyond vague mentions of "narrative" or "character development".
The worst part is, I'm not even surprised by this.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
It originally did, but once someone ran an article on it, people adviced the admin that his current reviews might afoul of steam policies, so they went back and revised all the reviews be neutral statements that SBI was involved, linking a source for each.
However, all the ratings on this curator are negative non-recommends, with SBI involvement as the stated reason. So it’s hard to paint it as just a neutral list.
That said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. If you want to avoid a company’s games, that should be allowed.
This was also reported on during the weekend, and when I looked into it then they had the Sweet Baby Inc logo with a big “forbidden” slashed red circle over it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If MBFC would rate all right leaning media source as not factual/not trustworthy, yes, it would be a clear sign that it would be biased itself. But it doesn’t.
My work here as a moderator is to give context. I won’t ask of our reader to believe or not the article, just to take the time to do their own research in order to complement the article, which may intentionally not show the whole story.
im just saying that if you do that for one you have to do it for all and definitely if all are talking about the same thing. and like i said are you going to use a bias check for the biased checker because they all do the same thing just not check themself. the bias check seems to be a never ending circle.
Yeah, the list is hit or miss. Some of the games are genuinely good and the recent baby diaper toss just seems childish, while some games are just plain bad regardless.
Aside from all the evidence that says otherwise? Why do you think it’s fine to change/ race swap the culture of another country? Isn’t this exactly the same thing that was found to be offensive when white people did it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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