Sweet Baby Inc. has come under attack as a Steam group with thousands of members has called for boycotts of games the company has worked on. The company has not done anything wrong, though, and is merely a victim of conservative conspiracy theories and manufactured controversy.
Those not well-versed in the video game industry likely have never heard of Sweet Baby before, even though it has worked on games like Spider-Man 2, God of War: Ragnarok, and Alan Wake II. However, it fulfills one of the lesser-known roles in video game development. Rather than being a developer, it serves as a consultation firm for other developers. When game projects are in various stages of production, Baby Sweet will come in and review all the material and essentially ensure it provides a cohesive narrative. The company might point out inconsistencies in the game plot or offer tips to further enrich gamers’ experiences.
It hardly sounds like anything to be enraged about. The company provides a vital function to improve games behind-the-scenes and likely doesn’t get the recognition it deserves for its work on major games. However, angry gamers are currently trying to detect every game associated with Sweet Baby to encourage others not to buy it. The reason? They believe that Sweet Baby is secretly poisoning their games with diversity.
Why conservative gamers decided Sweet Baby is “controversial”
It’s unclear how Sweet Baby got on the far-right’s radar, but somehow it did. The company’s employees discovered a still active Steam group called “Sweet Baby Inc. Detected.” The group currently has over 210,000 members, who are trying to compile a list of every game associated with Sweet Baby in any way. However, most of its forums and discussions have been wiped and locked. The ones that remain up are cryptic discussions, such as one titled “They are talking about us” and another titled “I’m gonna have to delete all posts for now…” In these posts, group members express frustration that the media is reporting on them and fear that the community will be deleted by Steam.
So, what was the purpose of this whole group to begin with? Kotaku’s Alyssa Mercante was able to get into the group’s Sweet Bay Inc. Detected Discord, where group members shared their conspiracy theories that the company is a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultation firm, that is essentially coming in and destroying games by forcing diversity into them. These members blame Sweet Baby for every recent game failure, although one of the only games it has worked on that had disappointing results was Suicide Squad.
Further conspiracy theories include claims that Alan Wake II‘s Saga Anderson would have been white if it weren’t for Sweet Baby, that Sweet Baby added Pride flags to Spider-Man 2, and that the company has “race and identity group quotas” for every project it is involved in. A lot of the Discord isn’t even about Sweet Baby but has turned into discussions and memes from conservative men complaining about the “woke” agenda infiltrating the video game industry. One user even railed against female characters in Overwatch, Forspoken, and Life is Strange because they have short hair while approving of the long-haired protagonist in ShiftUp. These people are triggered by any game that includes a member of a marginalized group or that doesn’t include their personal vision of what women should look like, and they have decided that Sweet Baby is responsible for all these inclusions.
There’s no evidence for these bizarre theories. On its website, the company does mention having a “team of diverse talent” because it understands it’s beneficial to have a “multitude of perspectives” when reviewing games. Additionally, one of several of its specialties is representation, as its diverse team can provide cultural consultation for companies that want to ensure their character depictions are authentic. Nowhere on the website does it say that it completely remakes games with diverse characters or forces these companies to change their designs. Angry conservative gamers literally just saw the words “representation” and “diverse” and created an entire false narrative about it.
What Sweet Baby actually does
Sweet Baby employees have denied the conservatives’ allegations. Even the companies they’ve worked with have been trying to diffuse rumors. Alan Wake II director Kyle Rowley responded to one prominent theory in no uncertain terms by labeling it “absolutely not true.”
Sweet Baby CEO Kim Belair also spoke to Kotaku to lay out the company’s process in detail. She explained that the company’s primary function is merely to review. Often, it’s just reviewing narration or stories to look for plot holes or errors. Occasionally, they are asked to do “cultural consultations or authenticity consultations.” However, these are only requested by companies who have already determined of their own free will to include a character from a marginalized group and seek Sweet Baby’s review to ensure they did it correctly.
Of course, one can’t expect far-right men to be able to wrap their heads around video game developers genuinely wanting representation in their games. They run to their “woke” conservative conspiracy theories because they just can’t comprehend that a lot of people aren’t hateful bigots who recoil at the sight of women with short hair or BIPOC video game characters. Surely, it must be a secret organization injecting wokeness into the world. Fortunately, Sweet Baby assured Kotaku that the gaming community was supporting them and wouldn’t be dropping them based on outlandish lies from conservatives.
The Discord and Steam groups are still active but have largely turned into men warning each other that they must delete everything and “be cool” because they’ve been discovered. Hopefully, the media coverage means Steam and Discord will take action and put an end to the group for spreading hateful ideologies and false information about a business.
(featured image: Sony)
