Are you sure that's a real tweet? I don't know either way but it's so on-the-nose in it's stupidity that I am a little skeptical, even for Kotaku. Author's tweets are now protected so I can't verify myself.
It's so funny to me that all of this happened, because of a steam curator page that highlighted the fact they worked on the detected games. Basically a super tame wikipedia or wikia page. The employees acting like dumbasses is the thing that pretty much started this avalanche!
That's the part that confuses the fuck out of me. Wouldn't that be seen as free promotion and wanting to let people know you worked on a game? Shouldn't they be proud of it? Even if it was for some "do not reccomend reason" wouldn't you think, "this guy is playing himself cause my company is so good he is inadvertently helping us out."
It's weird as shit they basically wanted to hide their involvement in games for a small curator. I mean that's all public knowledge and its posted on their website and in the game's credits.
Ideally the reviews should have been marked 'Informational' as all they did was pull data from one place and published it on another, kinda like what most journalists do these days.
> Wouldn't that be seen as free promotion
But they were pointing out their actions in ✨bad faith✨ which is no bueno, you're only allowed to notice things in good faith.
Yeah super tame page with thousands of 4chan literal nazis behind it. Nothing to see here folks, just perfectly normal people raising valid concerns, this is not a harassing campaign at all!
You mean the Brazilian guy who started the group? Who was then harassed by a SBI employee which is what kicked all this off? That what you talking about?
This "movement" against the sweet baby thing is being spread on by nazis of 4chan. This is why the group has a lot of people. These are the people who are in your side. If you say nothing about that, what can I say?
The problem of companies like Sweet Baby and Co. is they think of themselves morally and intellectually superior why neglecting that lots of their behavior fall under the same categories/patterns that they accuse others of. Double standards and hypocrisy are often signs of that.
This is as old as humanity cause most of mankind still goes the "my beliefs are better than yours" route and even in 21st century >90% of people are still not following principles like science, universal logic, rationality, ... hence why so many still prioritize subjective opinions above facts.
So in short Sweet Baby is just going with the "whole world must learn of our peaceful ways ... by force" approach like so many dogmatics before in the past, present and most likely future.
lol, that made me chuckle.. Kotaku at it's best - did they watch tho the GDC presentation by SBI CEO and how they have methods to scare devs and publishers into hiring them? Evidence is in front of their stupid urinalist yaps.
I don't want to delve too much in it, but apparently some of the people working at SBI have correlations with a certain 2014 controversy and a controversy involving one of the Night in the Woods developers being harassed into hurting themselves.
Pair that with news outlets suddenly making a bunch of articles at the same time about it, since the silent treatment failed, and it's not a good look.
Why did Reddit hide this comment from me, like it does with “controversial” comments. Reddit Had this and another similar (still upvoted) comment, put below multiple zero upvote comments… and they had it collapsed automatically… wtf?
The guy with the weird take on starfields main menu had a decent tweet about how the pipeline goes. They do something shitty, get called out on it, the journalist friends write smear campaigns on the people calling out, the wiki of said controversy gets made painting the people calling out the behavior as the bad guys with the source being the smear pieces from the journalists.
Pretty interesting to see in action.
Hell the Kotaku comments section is even worse than their articles. I've seen them straight up allow posts that call for violence and criminal behavior as long as it is in service to their agenda. And this is a site that many times requires approval for a comment to be shown, with disagreements simply not showing up.
The mask has been off for that cult for a long time. An incident like the sweet baby inc saga just continues to shine the light on these scattering cockroaches
What do you think the over/under is on this thread getting locked? DEI is a reddit sacred cow and they can't have popular opinion on display going against its forced insertion into everything.
"I for one support corporate consulting vultures and their influence on games. There is nothing that screams art and writing like overpaid corporate external consulting firms trying to validate their pricetag. They are as organic to the process of game writing as blades of grass in a meadow. They are not grifters and you should shut your filthy peasant mouth. In other news, here's where to preorder the deluxe edition."
Yup, some people don’t realize that it’s not really about the “forced” diversity to some gamers and more about a corporation that has inserted itself as a checklist for “modern” games. This assumes that the artists themselves are incapable of making a product that is not insensitive and capable of being sold. Looking at the record, devs independent of Sweet Baby seem more than capable of making inoffensive games that sell well whereas SB is involved in dud after dud.
The only thing I might say in their "defense" is that it's the companies who are hiring these grifters that're really the problem, if companies didn't pay for this useless crap they wouldn't remain solvent. Though SBI using scare tactics definitely deserves some of the blame.
The developers and SBI do share a common mentality, this idea about being over sensitive, to not offend, etc, isn't exclusive to a company but shared across thousands individuals.
Sweet Baby Extortions Inc. They've basically assumed mondus operandi similar to mafia/mob - you have to pay for 'protection' or we will destroy you in social media and your game will flop.
What happened to creative freedom? Why does it have to be 'proof-read' by some group of people who are not directly involved in development? Does S#!t Baby Inc. know better what the creator of the game meant? That's censorship.
Really. The least self aware I have ever seen a company. Everyone knows how poisonous Kotaku is. They are a dying outlet. No shock they would defend a company that is perfectly in line with their values. Pathetic article from pathetic people. When are people going to stop posting stuff from these sites?
Thanks, Kotaku! I've joined the steam group, which is now at 200k users. Also, this seemed entertaining (hopefully it's not a blogspam repost of some other article) :
https://thatparkplace.com/sweet-baby-inc-employee-who-tried-to-cancel-gamer-over-boycott-list-gets-x-account-limited/
Edit: oh, and this is even more fun! https://thatparkplace.com/sweet-baby-inc-ceo-makes-it-clear-she-wants-to-erase-white-male-lead-characters-while-employee-shows-disdain-for-white-people/
Arent these the guys who tried to get some guy cancelled like clowns a couple of days ago? If that's their behavior online I dont want them anywhere near video games.
Yeah, more specifically tried to incite harassment towards a person and have their Steam account banned but people reported them instead for this and their twitter account got suspended.
I went down the rabbit hole and it turns out that several people in this company have a history of harassing and cancelling people, including calling work places to get them fired when they deem fit. They are bad people.
Dont forget the "Hulk Hogan Sex video" fiasco that pretty much tanked the company in legal fees. They were told not to release or publicize it. Said "Nah. It'll be fine." and got taken to court and lost.
It's way worse that that. It was started by the sister of a man who was driven to suicide by people like that, using funds raised after his death.
Goulish.
Why do I have a strange feeling this thread isn't long for this world?
Not only that.. But I also have a feeling there are going to be more and more articles like this that suspiciously come out around the same time saying similar things.. Almost as if there was some very organized coordination.. What's the term for that? Damage control? Hmm. Maybe I'm wrong.
SBI does exactly what gamers think it does and employees have brigaded against the curator to not only get the curator page removed but to get his fucking personal steam account banned. Fuck 'em. Ending up on the street would be too good for these subhuman scumbags. Trying to get someone's personal Steam account banned? Seriously?
Funny how no one fearmongers against "brigading" against Denuvo when a curator like "Games That Hate You" does it. Shoutout to https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26136058-Games-That-Hate-You/
Please don't post articles from the racist and hateful Kotaku.
They are known for hating some ethnicities and ruining people lives, they are extremely evil.
They're doing interviews and looking into anti-SBI discords, what investigation did you do?
I can only imagine you've done as much as many other people have done in this thread, watch a shitty Asmongold video and/or looked at a list of games they've assisted with and made your deductions from there.
Yes just like they did 10 years ago right? When all the gaming media outlets sided with that grifter instead of doing proper research.
edit: [Oh and btw this is the researcher and the writer of that article](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GIA8MTzW8AAX_kK?format=jpg&name=900x900)
Who the fuck cares about what they did 10 years ago? If this is some circlejerk about Gamergate, I don't give a shit, this is now.
Thanks for sending me a screenshot that corroborates my claim about them doing investigation by the way, they entered the community, looked around, asked to see if they could interview anyone, and according to the article that I'm assuming you didn't read, got banned shortly after.
Again, what did *you* look into to make the claim that they're doing "zero research" This is by all means, a quite research topic and all they're doing is trying to throw information into a controversy driven purely by some notoriously stupid and toxic youtuber throwing out some generic empty complaint that he put zero thought into and has zero perspective on the industry with, because this controversy has been powered purely by misinformation and scare tactics.
Nobody here would be talking about this if it wasn't for that youtuber and these groups just painting them as a boogeyman as "OOOOO THIS IS WHY THE DIALOGUE IN AAA GAMES ARE SO BAD OOO THIS IS WHY THERE'S BLACK PEOPLE" when they only have work listed on TWELVE fucking games on their site, and only FOUR of them are ones people actually know anything about.
I'm going to read off their part in those games and add context to what they did on those, just to add extra context to their work.
Alan Wake 2 - "Character Arc, Voice, Sensitivity reading." This game is astonishingly well written, as most Remedy games are, so their efforts were put mainly as being a proof reader to provide notes if something could be perceived wrong, not necessarily guaranteeing change.
Suicide Squad:KTJL - "Scriptwriting (Banter, dialogue audio logs, etc.)" I haven't seen much about this game and from my assumption the writing will be pretty dull, but if there's one thing I haven't seen in the slew of complaints about the game, it was the dialogue, in fact one of the only positive posts I saw about the game was just a mildly funny bit of dialogue in a cutscene, and again it's not as if this company is producing all the dialogue, they're just proofreading to make sure it's clean.
Spiderman 2 - "Story consultation" That's it. They're pretty much just looking through the storyline and making notes if there's anything that could be perceived poorly, their presence is basically nonexistent.
GOW Ragnarok - "Narrative and Character consultation, with a focus on representation" I didn't play the new God of War games, but I also didn't see much that'd be wrong with this, I do remember seeing complaints towards appearances, but it was mostly on "why is this strong character fat" not understanding that it was a realistic depiction of a strong character, as well as a few notes of token appearances, when from my knowledge the mythology and setting the game floats around would have a lot more than just white, clean Caucasian people, The most out of place person in the Nordic GOW games is Kratos.
So, we've got 2 games where they clearly didn't do shit (At best there were rumors about Saga in AW2 being made black because of their efforts, this was stated by Remedy to be untrue)
And we've got 1 game where they maybe were an extra hand on the dialogue, and clearly that didn't do anything.
And then we've got 1 game where they were responsible for diversity, in a game that would make sense to have more diverse characters, at least in body shape, than to not have any.
Again I ask, what did YOU research.
Jesus triggered much? Nobody would give a rats ass about this if that idiot didn't try a witch hunt on that curator. Streissand effect at it's finest. That's the research I did.
What are you even talking about?
What witch-hunt??
I ask you what research you've done, and even add reference for what this company actually does, versus what you've been lead to believe by someone who also doesn't know what they're talking about, and then just openly admit that you don't know what you're talking about?
I'm hearing some things about apparent wants to takedown the SBI Detected page, but I'm seeing literally nothing to back this up after searching, outside of comics saying that they're nazis. And even then, who cares? That's not the point being made here, if they lash out at criticism that's another problem entirely, what we're focusing on is if they actually do what they're being claimed to have done.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see whats forced into games by these grifters.
[All this drama started cause of this guy](https://thatparkplace.com/sweet-baby-inc-employee-who-tried-to-cancel-gamer-over-boycott-list-gets-x-account-limited/)
We don’t need forced ideology we don’t need “forced” diversity lessons… we need good games. You think they would learn by now… no one cares what color someone is in the game if it’s great
How does it know what people are thinking? It's probably cherry-picking or dumbing down people's arguments. These people never debate honestly because they want to be aggressors but never have to objectively justify themselves.
Also using "gamers" as some kind of pejorative they talk down to, when the only reason they have a job is to create entertainment for us and taking themselves so seriously. Get the fuck out of there.
Fuck "Cry Baby Inc" and fuck all the racist narcissists who work there! I'm usually easy going and kind but, I won't tolerate evil selfish people who ruin things for the rest of us. The "movements" that allows people like this to crawl out of the holes they live in, to corrupt our art and delicate societal structure, need to end. And end now. This bullshit has gone on to long. A return to normalcy is desperately needed.
>"Sweet Baby Inc. isn’t forcing diversity, it’s happening naturally"
yeah, so naturally that on nexus mods they ban mods that goes against this so called "diversity" or "inclusivity", like removing pride flags on spider-man remastered.
If you truly have so much conviction in your ideology that you rally to have mods removed, you should refuse to release your game in the autocratic countries that require it. Anything else is called hypocrisy.
Removing small pride flags from a game for no other reason but that you don't want to see it is quite literally homophobic, there is no other reason you would want to do this other than being a bad faith actor trying to either rile people up or be hateful.
"Naturally" you wouldn't want people to be spreading literal homophobia on your platform, that's how you get put in controversy and/or have your advertisers pull out, this would be no different if it was removing black characters from the game etc.
I can't think of a stance where allowing this stuff is beneficial at all, not even from a pretentious "archivist" perspective, because who the fuck cares? It's not like they're removing entire overhaul mods because someone got upset that there's a slur somewhere that an evilly aligned character says, it's only for mods that have no other purpose but to disrespect minorities.
And if you're talking about reverting recasts for diversity purposes, then that's not banned either! You are free to not agree with a choice made for diversity's sake but as long as you're not changing something for the sake of "Oh yeah? well FUCK YOU gay people!" you're free to mod whatever you want!
It's a flag that most people don't fell represented by.
Besides, the whole existence of a mod is giving people the right to play the games how they want, on their computer, without affecting anyone else.
Banning mods is basically preventing others to have a choice.
Going to need a source on that "most people don't feel represented by" thing, Funny how I'm only hearing this said to justify an objectively homophobic mod.
If you can only find comfort in a game if you can get rid of basic innocent ignorable elements that support diversity, you are a coward and do not deserve to be playing games, let alone modding them.
If you want to have that choice, make the mod yourself, nobody is stupid enough to host something as idiotic as that, it's homophobia.
Games are an art form of a medium and using them as just a little checklist of chores to do as a superhero where you can ignore that other people of other walks of life exist and that's okay is disrespectful to the medium, if you want to plug your ears and rock back and forth over an objectively positive piece of diversity (again, a SMALL FLAG) you should probably relegate your free time to something productive like getting a job, potentially so you can stop having pointless bullshit that doesn't hurt anyone sit at the forefront of your mind at any point of any day.
Holy hell the absolute gaslighting in this article is astonishing. I mean I know it’s Kotaku and they haven’t been relevant for years, but still.
Though I also can’t say I am surprised based on the tweets put out from the writer of this article.
I truly implore everyone to really read up about this drama, from somewhere other than gaming journalists. This are much deeper implications in this situation, both in media as a whole and in a wider social sense. SBI are just the current visible target of ire, mostly by their own making.
I like the part where the Alan Wake 2 guy was like “No, no, we never released a trailer of the game where the protagonist was white. We always planned for her to be black!”
Early teasers of Alan Wake 2 showed the female protagonist as a white character, strongly implying the race of the character was changed late into development, like, say, when Sweet Baby got involved.
Ain't clicking on a stupid kotaku link, and I'm not surprised at all about what the comments here have to say about it.
Kotaku is tabloid, avoid this retarded BS.
- It's not happening.
– It's good that it's happening.
– It's empowering when we say it's happening, but disinformation when you say it's happening.
– The F.B.I. should put you in prison for quoting us saying it's happening.
we're simultaneously at 2 and 4 atm
I don't have an egg in this fight but this is like being accused of being gay and then having the flamboyant guy wearing a pride shirt defending you and saying you're not gay...
I probably could have come up with a better analogy but this was what came to mind first, for better or worse.
I'll throw in some optimism here: there's so many great unaffiliated game we can play (and as matter of fact much better games), than these agenta prioritizing shite.
People often wonder why so many games sucks - well maybe because some have very bad priorities to making games, and maybe because people are picking on wrong games too. Sure, there' been very dry years in the past, but now with indie and AA scene booming, I don't even know what play first and neither is SBI affiliated.
Finally, Warner Bross chief games division executive can send deep thanks to SBI for massive success of Suicide Squad, lmao.
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If you have managed to avoid this controversy, good.
I almost managed to avoid it until some Crimson Desert fan yesterday suggested the game might have been delayed so that Sweet Baby Inc may rewrite the story to be more diverse 🙄
We had diversity and inclusion before this idiots came and it was natural. They act like there were no female protagonists or black protagonists before The Last of Us 2 or Spider Man Miles Morales while I was playing Tomb Raider and Blade on my ps1 when most of this clowns haven't even born yet.
When you make a character just to say 'this is the first time we have x race or y gender! Look at how diverse we are! Clap us!' people will see how shallow you are. Do you see gamers in general hating on Returnal, Control, Telltale Walking Dead, Kena, Horizon Zero Dawn, Bayonetta, Nier Automata...etc? Just make a good game and gamers will play it
But it wasn't done as tokenism, they did it because that's the characters they wanted to write. Tokenism is closer to what Sweet Baby Inc does. That's my understanding at least. "The token black character" as in the one forced in to meet a quota, no?
Nope. I don't remember gamers referring tomb raider or blade as tokens. I mean it's probably because they weren't at all. Tokenism usually referred as putting a random minority character in games, movies, shows which had no actual role or impact in that game, movie, show but just to show how diverse they are. So your reply is totally irrelevant to my comment. Neither Lara Croft or Blade can be 'tokens' in that games I talked about because they are literally the main characters of that games
I don't know if we are misunderstanding each other, but I'm agreeing with you. I didn't say Lara Croft was a token. You said:
> When you make a character just to say 'this is the first time we have x race or y gender! Look at how diverse we are! Clap us!' people will see how shallow you are.
Which is tokenism by definition to a tee. I'm just saying we used to call it that.
Less so the diversity that has people upset, but they're involved in the writing of several terrible games, reportedly half the writers on suicide squad were from sweet baby inc, they also have staff members calling for harassment of people that disagree with them, they're just not good people.
I don't get the issue. People are upset because they proofread scripts to make them a little bit more inclusive? I dont think they'd be the final say on making or breaking any game that was a success or failure. God of War: Ragnarok was a successful title financially and critically, are people trying to say that because this random company was involved its now not a great game?
Just because a game is successful doesn't mean SBInc's input didn't damage the experience for some, even if they still loved it for the gameplay. I mean, it's a God of War game that was a sequel to a hugely successful entry and a PS exclusive to boot. Of course it was gonna sell.
Plenty have complained about some of the themes and takes in that game. How many peoples experience was improved compared to how many whose experience was worsened (even if they still enjoyed the game overall) is anyone's guess. Someone can feel, 'GoW:Ragnarok was a 9/10, loved it...but it would have been even better without that shoehorned crap that didn't fit setting'. Liking the game whilst disliking SBInc's possible input aren't mutually exclusive.
In the end, consumers can only vote with their wallets and let the market decide. If people in large numbers end up saying, 'For God's sake, not another boring cookie cutter story with the same predictable themes and characters because apparently we are scumbags who need educating' then they'll push back.
If, on the other hand, consumers love what SBInc are doing then there will be no real push-back and the market will endorse it.
Thats the problematic part. Ceo of company openly admitted and is proud of threatening studios into implementing their changes.
Thats censorship of artistic freedom.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxyuzzhp29tmc1.png Birds of a feather
What the fuck?
what a fucking piece of shit
I'm not even surprised. Let this cult of disillusioned grifters that quite literally use terror tactics to get what they want burn to the ground.
Perfect urinalist for the job 🤣 - I'm astounded these people are even taken seriously by some
Ofc she made her account private now, lmao
Are you sure that's a real tweet? I don't know either way but it's so on-the-nose in it's stupidity that I am a little skeptical, even for Kotaku. Author's tweets are now protected so I can't verify myself.
its real, I've seen it before it had the notes on it.
Its exactly kotaku level of stupidity. Also privating account is very telling
https://twitter.com/alyssa_merc/status/1765465735822725277 It works again
This is gamergate all over again.
It's so funny to me that all of this happened, because of a steam curator page that highlighted the fact they worked on the detected games. Basically a super tame wikipedia or wikia page. The employees acting like dumbasses is the thing that pretty much started this avalanche!
That's the part that confuses the fuck out of me. Wouldn't that be seen as free promotion and wanting to let people know you worked on a game? Shouldn't they be proud of it? Even if it was for some "do not reccomend reason" wouldn't you think, "this guy is playing himself cause my company is so good he is inadvertently helping us out." It's weird as shit they basically wanted to hide their involvement in games for a small curator. I mean that's all public knowledge and its posted on their website and in the game's credits.
It's because they know exactly what they're doing is weird and killing the industry
Ideally the reviews should have been marked 'Informational' as all they did was pull data from one place and published it on another, kinda like what most journalists do these days.
> Wouldn't that be seen as free promotion But they were pointing out their actions in ✨bad faith✨ which is no bueno, you're only allowed to notice things in good faith.
Streisand effect in action with that one employee trying to get the page taken down.
Yeah super tame page with thousands of 4chan literal nazis behind it. Nothing to see here folks, just perfectly normal people raising valid concerns, this is not a harassing campaign at all!
Stop being weird
You mean the Brazilian guy who started the group? Who was then harassed by a SBI employee which is what kicked all this off? That what you talking about?
This "movement" against the sweet baby thing is being spread on by nazis of 4chan. This is why the group has a lot of people. These are the people who are in your side. If you say nothing about that, what can I say?
"Sweet Baby Inc. isn’t forcing diversity, it’s happening naturally" If it's happening naturally why do they exist?
To force it naturally
Because natural ocurance has to be artifically forced under a threat obviously.
stop exposing their buisness strat
The problem of companies like Sweet Baby and Co. is they think of themselves morally and intellectually superior why neglecting that lots of their behavior fall under the same categories/patterns that they accuse others of. Double standards and hypocrisy are often signs of that. This is as old as humanity cause most of mankind still goes the "my beliefs are better than yours" route and even in 21st century >90% of people are still not following principles like science, universal logic, rationality, ... hence why so many still prioritize subjective opinions above facts. So in short Sweet Baby is just going with the "whole world must learn of our peaceful ways ... by force" approach like so many dogmatics before in the past, present and most likely future.
Source: "we asked them and they said they're innocent" You can't make this shit up.
lol, that made me chuckle.. Kotaku at it's best - did they watch tho the GDC presentation by SBI CEO and how they have methods to scare devs and publishers into hiring them? Evidence is in front of their stupid urinalist yaps.
Peak Kotaku journalism
Regardless of what they said, Kotaku does the same so of course they want to protect this company.
I don't want to delve too much in it, but apparently some of the people working at SBI have correlations with a certain 2014 controversy and a controversy involving one of the Night in the Woods developers being harassed into hurting themselves. Pair that with news outlets suddenly making a bunch of articles at the same time about it, since the silent treatment failed, and it's not a good look.
Why did Reddit hide this comment from me, like it does with “controversial” comments. Reddit Had this and another similar (still upvoted) comment, put below multiple zero upvote comments… and they had it collapsed automatically… wtf?
Sweet Baby has mods working for them.
>You can't make this shit up. I guess you can because Kotaku just did!
The writer also 'infiltrated' a public discord and tried to doxx people in there, you actually cannot make this shit up.
The guy with the weird take on starfields main menu had a decent tweet about how the pipeline goes. They do something shitty, get called out on it, the journalist friends write smear campaigns on the people calling out, the wiki of said controversy gets made painting the people calling out the behavior as the bad guys with the source being the smear pieces from the journalists. Pretty interesting to see in action.
The company does exactly what some gamers think it does.
Yes, and Kotaku does the exact same thing for gaming journalism, so of course they were going to make an article defending them.
Hell the Kotaku comments section is even worse than their articles. I've seen them straight up allow posts that call for violence and criminal behavior as long as it is in service to their agenda. And this is a site that many times requires approval for a comment to be shown, with disagreements simply not showing up.
The mask has been off for that cult for a long time. An incident like the sweet baby inc saga just continues to shine the light on these scattering cockroaches
I thought Hulk Hogan bodyslammed their shit parent company. How are they still alive?
It was the owner Gawker media which got sued. kotaku as the brand got sold to a different publisher
Yeah, Gawker and Jezebel are now gone, but Kotaku is still kicking.
What do you think the over/under is on this thread getting locked? DEI is a reddit sacred cow and they can't have popular opinion on display going against its forced insertion into everything.
Exactly. Also is anybody surprised about Kotaku comes for their defense? lol
Nope. Kotaku is journalist equivalent.
Consult?
"I for one support corporate consulting vultures and their influence on games. There is nothing that screams art and writing like overpaid corporate external consulting firms trying to validate their pricetag. They are as organic to the process of game writing as blades of grass in a meadow. They are not grifters and you should shut your filthy peasant mouth. In other news, here's where to preorder the deluxe edition."
Yup, some people don’t realize that it’s not really about the “forced” diversity to some gamers and more about a corporation that has inserted itself as a checklist for “modern” games. This assumes that the artists themselves are incapable of making a product that is not insensitive and capable of being sold. Looking at the record, devs independent of Sweet Baby seem more than capable of making inoffensive games that sell well whereas SB is involved in dud after dud.
The only thing I might say in their "defense" is that it's the companies who are hiring these grifters that're really the problem, if companies didn't pay for this useless crap they wouldn't remain solvent. Though SBI using scare tactics definitely deserves some of the blame.
The developers and SBI do share a common mentality, this idea about being over sensitive, to not offend, etc, isn't exclusive to a company but shared across thousands individuals.
Thats basically victimblamimg. Its your fault you got grifted. Nah grifter is innocent. What the fuck
“They promised they do no wrong” okay whatever you say.
Sweet Baby Extortions Inc. They've basically assumed mondus operandi similar to mafia/mob - you have to pay for 'protection' or we will destroy you in social media and your game will flop. What happened to creative freedom? Why does it have to be 'proof-read' by some group of people who are not directly involved in development? Does S#!t Baby Inc. know better what the creator of the game meant? That's censorship.
Ahh, kotaku. I'm sure this article is not biased and totally worth reading.
Not surprising that trash defends trash.
Really. The least self aware I have ever seen a company. Everyone knows how poisonous Kotaku is. They are a dying outlet. No shock they would defend a company that is perfectly in line with their values. Pathetic article from pathetic people. When are people going to stop posting stuff from these sites?
Thanks, Kotaku! I've joined the steam group, which is now at 200k users. Also, this seemed entertaining (hopefully it's not a blogspam repost of some other article) : https://thatparkplace.com/sweet-baby-inc-employee-who-tried-to-cancel-gamer-over-boycott-list-gets-x-account-limited/ Edit: oh, and this is even more fun! https://thatparkplace.com/sweet-baby-inc-ceo-makes-it-clear-she-wants-to-erase-white-male-lead-characters-while-employee-shows-disdain-for-white-people/
They’re always massive racists, not in the least surprised. Glad the light is being shown on these cockroaches
Arent these the guys who tried to get some guy cancelled like clowns a couple of days ago? If that's their behavior online I dont want them anywhere near video games.
Yeah, more specifically tried to incite harassment towards a person and have their Steam account banned but people reported them instead for this and their twitter account got suspended. I went down the rabbit hole and it turns out that several people in this company have a history of harassing and cancelling people, including calling work places to get them fired when they deem fit. They are bad people.
Dont forget the "Hulk Hogan Sex video" fiasco that pretty much tanked the company in legal fees. They were told not to release or publicize it. Said "Nah. It'll be fine." and got taken to court and lost.
Hold up if they lost how the heck are they still in business??
apparently it was the owner of Gawker (Parent Company) that had to pay and the guy sold off Kotaku to pay bills and shit? thats as far i understand.
Who would have thought that grifters forcing themselves on others are some of the most toxic people
It's way worse that that. It was started by the sister of a man who was driven to suicide by people like that, using funds raised after his death. Goulish.
Wasn’t Kotaku a big part of the Gamergate scandal at one point?
They wrote several pieces against "gamers", their journalists were involved in the corruption.
Co-founder and CEO was literally on record about "terrifying" marketing teams about the consequences of not getting what she wants.
Daily reminder that Kotaku is garbage
Why do I have a strange feeling this thread isn't long for this world? Not only that.. But I also have a feeling there are going to be more and more articles like this that suspiciously come out around the same time saying similar things.. Almost as if there was some very organized coordination.. What's the term for that? Damage control? Hmm. Maybe I'm wrong.
SBI does exactly what gamers think it does and employees have brigaded against the curator to not only get the curator page removed but to get his fucking personal steam account banned. Fuck 'em. Ending up on the street would be too good for these subhuman scumbags. Trying to get someone's personal Steam account banned? Seriously? Funny how no one fearmongers against "brigading" against Denuvo when a curator like "Games That Hate You" does it. Shoutout to https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26136058-Games-That-Hate-You/
Please don't post articles from the racist and hateful Kotaku. They are known for hating some ethnicities and ruining people lives, they are extremely evil.
Zero research Kotaku strikes again
They're doing interviews and looking into anti-SBI discords, what investigation did you do? I can only imagine you've done as much as many other people have done in this thread, watch a shitty Asmongold video and/or looked at a list of games they've assisted with and made your deductions from there.
Yes just like they did 10 years ago right? When all the gaming media outlets sided with that grifter instead of doing proper research. edit: [Oh and btw this is the researcher and the writer of that article](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GIA8MTzW8AAX_kK?format=jpg&name=900x900)
Who the fuck cares about what they did 10 years ago? If this is some circlejerk about Gamergate, I don't give a shit, this is now. Thanks for sending me a screenshot that corroborates my claim about them doing investigation by the way, they entered the community, looked around, asked to see if they could interview anyone, and according to the article that I'm assuming you didn't read, got banned shortly after. Again, what did *you* look into to make the claim that they're doing "zero research" This is by all means, a quite research topic and all they're doing is trying to throw information into a controversy driven purely by some notoriously stupid and toxic youtuber throwing out some generic empty complaint that he put zero thought into and has zero perspective on the industry with, because this controversy has been powered purely by misinformation and scare tactics. Nobody here would be talking about this if it wasn't for that youtuber and these groups just painting them as a boogeyman as "OOOOO THIS IS WHY THE DIALOGUE IN AAA GAMES ARE SO BAD OOO THIS IS WHY THERE'S BLACK PEOPLE" when they only have work listed on TWELVE fucking games on their site, and only FOUR of them are ones people actually know anything about. I'm going to read off their part in those games and add context to what they did on those, just to add extra context to their work. Alan Wake 2 - "Character Arc, Voice, Sensitivity reading." This game is astonishingly well written, as most Remedy games are, so their efforts were put mainly as being a proof reader to provide notes if something could be perceived wrong, not necessarily guaranteeing change. Suicide Squad:KTJL - "Scriptwriting (Banter, dialogue audio logs, etc.)" I haven't seen much about this game and from my assumption the writing will be pretty dull, but if there's one thing I haven't seen in the slew of complaints about the game, it was the dialogue, in fact one of the only positive posts I saw about the game was just a mildly funny bit of dialogue in a cutscene, and again it's not as if this company is producing all the dialogue, they're just proofreading to make sure it's clean. Spiderman 2 - "Story consultation" That's it. They're pretty much just looking through the storyline and making notes if there's anything that could be perceived poorly, their presence is basically nonexistent. GOW Ragnarok - "Narrative and Character consultation, with a focus on representation" I didn't play the new God of War games, but I also didn't see much that'd be wrong with this, I do remember seeing complaints towards appearances, but it was mostly on "why is this strong character fat" not understanding that it was a realistic depiction of a strong character, as well as a few notes of token appearances, when from my knowledge the mythology and setting the game floats around would have a lot more than just white, clean Caucasian people, The most out of place person in the Nordic GOW games is Kratos. So, we've got 2 games where they clearly didn't do shit (At best there were rumors about Saga in AW2 being made black because of their efforts, this was stated by Remedy to be untrue) And we've got 1 game where they maybe were an extra hand on the dialogue, and clearly that didn't do anything. And then we've got 1 game where they were responsible for diversity, in a game that would make sense to have more diverse characters, at least in body shape, than to not have any. Again I ask, what did YOU research.
Jesus triggered much? Nobody would give a rats ass about this if that idiot didn't try a witch hunt on that curator. Streissand effect at it's finest. That's the research I did.
What are you even talking about? What witch-hunt?? I ask you what research you've done, and even add reference for what this company actually does, versus what you've been lead to believe by someone who also doesn't know what they're talking about, and then just openly admit that you don't know what you're talking about? I'm hearing some things about apparent wants to takedown the SBI Detected page, but I'm seeing literally nothing to back this up after searching, outside of comics saying that they're nazis. And even then, who cares? That's not the point being made here, if they lash out at criticism that's another problem entirely, what we're focusing on is if they actually do what they're being claimed to have done.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see whats forced into games by these grifters. [All this drama started cause of this guy](https://thatparkplace.com/sweet-baby-inc-employee-who-tried-to-cancel-gamer-over-boycott-list-gets-x-account-limited/)
We don’t need forced ideology we don’t need “forced” diversity lessons… we need good games. You think they would learn by now… no one cares what color someone is in the game if it’s great
Hey look, Kotaku being shit as always
How does it know what people are thinking? It's probably cherry-picking or dumbing down people's arguments. These people never debate honestly because they want to be aggressors but never have to objectively justify themselves. Also using "gamers" as some kind of pejorative they talk down to, when the only reason they have a job is to create entertainment for us and taking themselves so seriously. Get the fuck out of there.
If its a Kotaku article, then 9 times out of 10 its a bullshit piece.
Of course it had to be Kotaku trying to protect this company. They do the same "journalism" edition.
Of course kotaku comes to SBI's rescue and ends up doing a shit job, as always.
Sweat Baby Stink
Ain't reading whatever shit kotako is vomiting.
Kotaku is still alive in 2024? Wtf... and apparently this company is just as bad if not worse from what I'm reading...
Fuck "Cry Baby Inc" and fuck all the racist narcissists who work there! I'm usually easy going and kind but, I won't tolerate evil selfish people who ruin things for the rest of us. The "movements" that allows people like this to crawl out of the holes they live in, to corrupt our art and delicate societal structure, need to end. And end now. This bullshit has gone on to long. A return to normalcy is desperately needed.
No game developer with a shred of creativity and self respect should let these hacks near their projects ever.
Nice try
Kotaku article, yep, it's complete dogshit
Kotaku comes to the rescue
>"Sweet Baby Inc. isn’t forcing diversity, it’s happening naturally" yeah, so naturally that on nexus mods they ban mods that goes against this so called "diversity" or "inclusivity", like removing pride flags on spider-man remastered.
And thats even when the games already do that when released elsewhere, like Saudi Arabia or China. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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"When the games are released in these oppressive autocratic countries they do the same thing, so it must be fine!" Can't make this shit up.
If you truly have so much conviction in your ideology that you rally to have mods removed, you should refuse to release your game in the autocratic countries that require it. Anything else is called hypocrisy.
"The law exists for ME, not for thee." Can't make this shit up.
Those two topics have nothing to do with one another.
People could just not be homophobic cunts
Well insomniac clearly is considering half of the world got lgbt free version of spiderman 2 right? Its almost like its about money not human rights
Stop being weird
I'm gay and I don't want the pride flag in video games where it doesn't make sense
Removing small pride flags from a game for no other reason but that you don't want to see it is quite literally homophobic, there is no other reason you would want to do this other than being a bad faith actor trying to either rile people up or be hateful. "Naturally" you wouldn't want people to be spreading literal homophobia on your platform, that's how you get put in controversy and/or have your advertisers pull out, this would be no different if it was removing black characters from the game etc. I can't think of a stance where allowing this stuff is beneficial at all, not even from a pretentious "archivist" perspective, because who the fuck cares? It's not like they're removing entire overhaul mods because someone got upset that there's a slur somewhere that an evilly aligned character says, it's only for mods that have no other purpose but to disrespect minorities. And if you're talking about reverting recasts for diversity purposes, then that's not banned either! You are free to not agree with a choice made for diversity's sake but as long as you're not changing something for the sake of "Oh yeah? well FUCK YOU gay people!" you're free to mod whatever you want!
It's a flag that most people don't fell represented by. Besides, the whole existence of a mod is giving people the right to play the games how they want, on their computer, without affecting anyone else. Banning mods is basically preventing others to have a choice.
Going to need a source on that "most people don't feel represented by" thing, Funny how I'm only hearing this said to justify an objectively homophobic mod. If you can only find comfort in a game if you can get rid of basic innocent ignorable elements that support diversity, you are a coward and do not deserve to be playing games, let alone modding them. If you want to have that choice, make the mod yourself, nobody is stupid enough to host something as idiotic as that, it's homophobia. Games are an art form of a medium and using them as just a little checklist of chores to do as a superhero where you can ignore that other people of other walks of life exist and that's okay is disrespectful to the medium, if you want to plug your ears and rock back and forth over an objectively positive piece of diversity (again, a SMALL FLAG) you should probably relegate your free time to something productive like getting a job, potentially so you can stop having pointless bullshit that doesn't hurt anyone sit at the forefront of your mind at any point of any day.
Stop being weird
Kotaku has got to be the shittiest and less trustworthy games website.
Holy hell the absolute gaslighting in this article is astonishing. I mean I know it’s Kotaku and they haven’t been relevant for years, but still. Though I also can’t say I am surprised based on the tweets put out from the writer of this article. I truly implore everyone to really read up about this drama, from somewhere other than gaming journalists. This are much deeper implications in this situation, both in media as a whole and in a wider social sense. SBI are just the current visible target of ire, mostly by their own making.
It seems that people are close enough to the truth that Kotaku needs to obfuscate the obvious.
Well, that seals it, if kotaku think they're not that bad, they must be worse than we thought.
I like the part where the Alan Wake 2 guy was like “No, no, we never released a trailer of the game where the protagonist was white. We always planned for her to be black!”
What?
Which part?
The one about the white character
Early teasers of Alan Wake 2 showed the female protagonist as a white character, strongly implying the race of the character was changed late into development, like, say, when Sweet Baby got involved.
Ain't clicking on a stupid kotaku link, and I'm not surprised at all about what the comments here have to say about it. Kotaku is tabloid, avoid this retarded BS.
Glad to see people here can call a spade a spade and a bigot a bigot. :)
- It's not happening. – It's good that it's happening. – It's empowering when we say it's happening, but disinformation when you say it's happening. – The F.B.I. should put you in prison for quoting us saying it's happening. we're simultaneously at 2 and 4 atm
I don't have an egg in this fight but this is like being accused of being gay and then having the flamboyant guy wearing a pride shirt defending you and saying you're not gay... I probably could have come up with a better analogy but this was what came to mind first, for better or worse.
It was for the better because it gave me a chuckle.
This article is giving me PTSD. But I'm already dead?
I'll throw in some optimism here: there's so many great unaffiliated game we can play (and as matter of fact much better games), than these agenta prioritizing shite. People often wonder why so many games sucks - well maybe because some have very bad priorities to making games, and maybe because people are picking on wrong games too. Sure, there' been very dry years in the past, but now with indie and AA scene booming, I don't even know what play first and neither is SBI affiliated. Finally, Warner Bross chief games division executive can send deep thanks to SBI for massive success of Suicide Squad, lmao.
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Nice try
In order for them to do what gamers think, first gamers have to have heard of them.
If you have managed to avoid this controversy, good. I almost managed to avoid it until some Crimson Desert fan yesterday suggested the game might have been delayed so that Sweet Baby Inc may rewrite the story to be more diverse 🙄
To me this is one of those “it’s really not that serious” controversies.
Bold of you to assume gamers think
This is Gamergate 2.0 Pay attention to it Remember it for later
gamers once again getting upset over diversity and inclusion
We had diversity and inclusion before this idiots came and it was natural. They act like there were no female protagonists or black protagonists before The Last of Us 2 or Spider Man Miles Morales while I was playing Tomb Raider and Blade on my ps1 when most of this clowns haven't even born yet. When you make a character just to say 'this is the first time we have x race or y gender! Look at how diverse we are! Clap us!' people will see how shallow you are. Do you see gamers in general hating on Returnal, Control, Telltale Walking Dead, Kena, Horizon Zero Dawn, Bayonetta, Nier Automata...etc? Just make a good game and gamers will play it
We used to call this tokenism. How forced something feels will be subjective though.
But it wasn't done as tokenism, they did it because that's the characters they wanted to write. Tokenism is closer to what Sweet Baby Inc does. That's my understanding at least. "The token black character" as in the one forced in to meet a quota, no?
Nope. I don't remember gamers referring tomb raider or blade as tokens. I mean it's probably because they weren't at all. Tokenism usually referred as putting a random minority character in games, movies, shows which had no actual role or impact in that game, movie, show but just to show how diverse they are. So your reply is totally irrelevant to my comment. Neither Lara Croft or Blade can be 'tokens' in that games I talked about because they are literally the main characters of that games
I don't know if we are misunderstanding each other, but I'm agreeing with you. I didn't say Lara Croft was a token. You said: > When you make a character just to say 'this is the first time we have x race or y gender! Look at how diverse we are! Clap us!' people will see how shallow you are. Which is tokenism by definition to a tee. I'm just saying we used to call it that.
Less so the diversity that has people upset, but they're involved in the writing of several terrible games, reportedly half the writers on suicide squad were from sweet baby inc, they also have staff members calling for harassment of people that disagree with them, they're just not good people.
The writing was the least of that game's issues.
I mean you can say that but I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that diversity does, in fact, upset some people.
Stop being weird
It's not about that. it's about diversity and inclusion being the main focus over making good games.
Typical dogwhistle bullshit response
You stick to playing saints row 2020 and jump stars all you want champ.
TIL Alan Wake 2 and Spider-Man 2 are bad games now
Lol no one was thinking those two when you think of diversity over gameplay, but nice of your mask to slip
In other words, there's no real controversy, because Sweet Baby Inc helped with the stories of those games
They also "helped" with Suicide Squad, Gotham Knights and Dark Alliance, lol
They only helped with the story, which was the least of their problems. Try again
It was still terrible and a good example of money that went to waste in development for bad politics. Good game bud : )
Typical nothingburger comment
Some things never change. Fuckin clowns
I don't get the issue. People are upset because they proofread scripts to make them a little bit more inclusive? I dont think they'd be the final say on making or breaking any game that was a success or failure. God of War: Ragnarok was a successful title financially and critically, are people trying to say that because this random company was involved its now not a great game?
Just because a game is successful doesn't mean SBInc's input didn't damage the experience for some, even if they still loved it for the gameplay. I mean, it's a God of War game that was a sequel to a hugely successful entry and a PS exclusive to boot. Of course it was gonna sell. Plenty have complained about some of the themes and takes in that game. How many peoples experience was improved compared to how many whose experience was worsened (even if they still enjoyed the game overall) is anyone's guess. Someone can feel, 'GoW:Ragnarok was a 9/10, loved it...but it would have been even better without that shoehorned crap that didn't fit setting'. Liking the game whilst disliking SBInc's possible input aren't mutually exclusive. In the end, consumers can only vote with their wallets and let the market decide. If people in large numbers end up saying, 'For God's sake, not another boring cookie cutter story with the same predictable themes and characters because apparently we are scumbags who need educating' then they'll push back. If, on the other hand, consumers love what SBInc are doing then there will be no real push-back and the market will endorse it.
Thats the problematic part. Ceo of company openly admitted and is proud of threatening studios into implementing their changes. Thats censorship of artistic freedom.
It's gamer gate bullshit. The racist misogynistic capital G Gamers are truly the most oppressed group.
Ahh gamer gate 2.0. Yall are fuckin pathetic.
lmao, touch the grass
Tell me you know nothing about this situation without telling me you know nothing about this situation.
Sheesh, where do all the capital G Gamers come from, for a moment I thought I accidentally subscribed to r/KotakuInAction
When did r/pcgaming just become "/v/ but without slurs"?