One would think that the Culture War is impacting only Hollywood, but unfortunately that isn’t the case. The gaming industry has been rocked recently due to agendas in recent games becoming public, and though there are many actors behind the scenes causing the pandemonium, one company in particular is getting all of the attention: Sweet Baby Inc. Let’s begin with the basics. Sweet Baby is a consulting firm that works in the gaming industry, whose sole purpose is to make sure that ESG/DEI, aka representation and diversity, exists in the games they are hired to work on. They help mainly in the writing aspect of the game, stuff like story, themes, and characters.

The story of the Sweet Baby controversy and what many are calling the second coming of Gamer Gate started when a Sweet Baby employee named Chris Kindred took to Twitter (I’m never called it X, Elon) to highlight a Steam Curator page simply called Sweet Baby Inc. Detected. Now a Steam Curator page is essentially a tool for users, mainly reviewers and YouTubers, to catalog games and if they recommend them. Kindred claimed that the Curator page was derived from racist thoughts and agendas and demanded that Steam shut down the page. In response, the gaming community has sided with the Curator page’s curator and at the time of writing this article, Sweet Baby Inc. Detected now has around 250,000 followers including myself. Now why did I follow this Curator page? Simple. Because I stand with the ideas of free speech and against the push of conformity and censorship that Sweet Baby and their attack hounds like Kindred are pushing for. But since this controversy has started, many people have looked into the history of Sweet Baby; their origins, partners and past projects, none of which shine a good light on the company.

Sweet Baby’s history in gaming has some major titles, let’s see if you have heard of any of them. Saint’s Row (2022), Forspoken, Starfield, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, Marvel’s Spiderman 2, Gotham Knights. Out of all of these major releases, only Spiderman 2 walked away as a critical success and even then, there are many who have issues with it, mainly around the story. Sure, Starfield was a financial success, but as I have talked about in my review of the game and how Starfield rates on Steam at present (40% through recent reviews by the way), the game isn’t loved by the fans per say. Forspoken and the Saint’s Row remake caused their respective studios to close, while Suicide Squad has less than 400 players for a live service game. So, it’s safe to say that Sweet Baby doesn’t have a great track record.

What about origins? Sweet Baby was founded in 2018 by two former Ubisoft developers, Kim Belair and Ari MacGillivray. But the main focus on the company’s past comes from a video taken in 2019 while Belair spoke at GDC, the Game Developers Conference. During her panel, Belair spoke about her origins as a developer where she said her passion for gaming circulated around making a character in Mass Effect’s character creator like her and loved the moment her character met another character of color. She would go on to state she wanted to make the moment she felt available for everyone. Now this is good on the surface, every gamer should feel recognized and feel a connection to the characters in the game they are playing, however, Belair wants to make the feeling literal. Belair and Sweet Baby want to inject diverse characters, not for a story meaning or purpose, but to check off a box. And that is not the most damned thing Belair said at this panel. Down the line, she stated that if the developer or consulter is not getting what they wanted from the studio, they should sit down with marketing and basically threaten them by holding over the consequences for their actions over their head. Not sure about you, but that sounds like blackmail to me.

Final point on Sweet Baby, are they the only company doing this? Sadly, they aren’t. Sweet Baby is part of a collection of studios under one umbrella called Weird Ghosts. Other companies that fall under this umbrella include Cozy Comet Games, Diaspora Games, Cooped Up, and Amelore, to name a few. All of these studios follow the same agenda set forth by Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, who were victims of the supposed last Gamer Gate back in 2014. Now I have no idea what the base of the last Gamer Gate was because back in 2014 I was in high school and was worried more about my sophomore year finals than a gaming controversy. Either way though I do not tolerate harassment in either camp of this Culture War, no one should be sending death threats to anyone nor barring anyone from enjoying video games. Video games are an escape for everyone to enjoy, in whatever way they see fit. Yet both Sarkeesian and Quinn are violators of these rules in addition to being victims. In a Twitter post recently uncovered, Sarkeesian ‘offered’ her services to CDProject Red and said that she could help with their supposed history of harassment, in a way that if CD didn’t hire her, they would be punished. Meanwhile Quinn along with her fellows doxed a charity website that was promoting female developers in the industry, but had a different method of going about it, through merit rather than the need to meet ESG.

Yet this controversy goes beyond just Sweet Baby, it infects gaming journalism in a way similar to that in Hollywood. These developers and activists have connections with journalists and Youtubers that think in the same way as them, or worse, write only on trends and gravitate towards where the wind is blowing. Journalism should be about truth and using investigation skills to find it, but sadly this new form of gaming journalism has devolved into a race to see who gets the most clicks. It doesn’t help that the stories that are coming in defense of Sweet Baby aren’t written to defend their skills or merit. No, instead they think it best to call anyone who disagrees with them racist and misogynistic. A journalist from Kotacho, who is busy at work trying to defend a company with employees attempting to censor the public, named Alyssa Mercante, went into a discord server where the Steam Curator page creator hung out and didn’t even bother changing her username. She got caught in screenshots of her blatantly asking questions on how the server come to be or how their racist tendencies started. Really professional and skilled I say. She should be hired by the New York Times. And it isn’t just gaming journalists going back to Chris Kindred and her tweets, many supporters of Sweet Baby are taking to social media to ‘defend’ DEI in gaming by attacking people who think differently. One major attacker, felix at home, or legobutts, another employee at Sweet Baby has become notorious by also jumping on the bandwagon of harassing the Steam Curator and insulting those who disagreed with them.

This push for canceling people who disagree with anyone is absolutely disgusting. Apparently, the days of open discussion on things are gone. I for one welcome discussion on my opinions and am certainly willing to talk about different point of views. And if by the end of a conversation we don’t come to an agreed conclusion, it is OKAY to agree to disagree. We are humans, not robots, so it is okay for us to have different ideas and beliefs. The actions of Sweet Baby in their work and how their supporters act on social media, is a hidden type of propaganda and push for conformity. Their goal is to make gamers agree with their agendas and nothing more. If a company truly wanted to make games a safer place for women, minorities, or members of the LGBTQ community, it shouldn’t attack others who give valid criticism. Their work would be to create well written projects with great gameplay. In layman’s terms, make a great video game.

A great videogame that came out recently is Helldivers 2, a wonderful 3^rd person shooter. The whole goal of the game is pushing teamwork to defeat wave after wave of enemies, yet the supporters of DEI went after developers of the game, calling for cosmetics to represent their groups. Wisely, Arrowhead Studios said no. They don’t want politics to divide their player base and create a toxic environment in a game that is focused on UNITY and TEAMWORK, regardless of player background. In a strange way, Helldivers 2, a game that takes reference from Starship Troopers, is the ideal way the world should be, people coming together to overcome obstacles and challenges. What Sweet Baby is doing is the opposite. In their pursuit of pushing an agenda to force DEI and ESG down, Sweet Baby and other studios like them have only divided gamers. The vocal minority are attacking gamers and those who stand out against them. The funny thing is the Steam Curator page was created not to boycott, it had no message to it, it merely informed consumers if Sweet Baby is present in a game. But after Sweet Baby’s actions and the conduct of their employees, it became a boycott and a symbol of unity against censorship.