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[VulcanRaven]

To anyone wondering what Sweet Baby Inc. is, they're a sort of "support" studio (I'll explain why i put SUPPORT in quotes in a bit), that is contracted by game devs to help with certain "aspects" of their games.

Now that we got the bullshit out of the way, let's tear down the pretty façade and get into what they're really about and what their true motives are, since that's something well known that they don't ever, really bring up.

They simply push devs to basically sacrifice creativity for the sake diversity, inclusion and representation of certain "minorities" in their games. In a few words: They "woke"-nize the games you play that they're involved in. Oh and they're also a bunch white people hating bastards so there's that too, on top of some other shady motivations, which are part of an even bigger rabbit hole that's too deep to dive into.

So, a fair bit of advice. Stay away from video games that credit them...and you'll probably save your sanity.

I don't think they have as much influence as people say they have:

 

[Boglin]

I don't think they have as much influence as people say they have:

This begs the question about why they are hiring these small consulting agencies in the first place if the company is just going to do whatever the fuck it wants anyway.
I personally think the simple act of hiring of such agencies like Sweet Baby represents a dead canary in the coal mine and I should stay away. Even if Sweet Baby itself isn't the problem and doesn't hold much power, a company hiring them signals to me that the company cares about pushing ideological messaging and/or taking investments which have stipulations that impact the end product in ways that aren't in the interests of a large portion of customers.

 

[Pimpbaa]

Fuck the babies! Er..don't take that out of context.

 

[FunkMiller]

The source of this info is a little suspect. As far as I can tell it's just that single tweet. However, I don't doubt that this kind of thing happens a lot. Hell that one Sweet Baby lady said as much in her video where she was like "we go to your marketing department and we say, 'you don't want people to say that you were against diversity, right?' ".

If it did happen that way, I'm glad they told the west to go fuck off and made the game that they wanted to make.

Wukong is probably a load of janky bullshit, but one day there might be a western dev with a track record who decides to avoid DEI consultancy, and that’ll be an interesting test case as to how much grief they get from certain quarters.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

The source of this info is a little suspect. As far as I can tell it's just that single tweet. However, I don't doubt that this kind of thing happens a lot. Hell that one Sweet Baby lady said as much in her video where she was like "we go to your marketing department and we say, 'you don't want people to say that you were against diversity, right?' ".

If it did happen that way, I'm glad they told the west to go fuck off and made the game that they wanted to make.

The reality is that the West are a minority and the 21st century is going to be Asian. And Asians are decidedly unwoke.

 

[ShadowNate]

I mean it's cute they think that after years of games pushing certain agendas and messages to the detriment of old IPs, favorite characters and, of course, the resulting neglected quality of dialogue and stories, the knee-jerking namecalling when people were turned off, and "cancelling" the most popular voices with aphorisms...
...that the reaction would be people peacefully smoking their pipe and carefully studying DEI consultants influence on a case by case basis.

Yes, ideally, it would not be as bad as they have been, but that's not how the world and especially social media works.

 

[Ogbert]

I don't think they have as much influence as people say they have:

Well, by definition, any consultancy will only have the influence that the organisation allows it to have.

Some will simply contact SBI to tick a box. Others will go balls deep.

 

[Johnny Concrete]

This begs the question about why they are hiring these small consulting agencies in the first place if the company is just going to do whatever the fuck it wants anyway.
I personally think the simple act of hiring of such agencies like Sweet Baby represents a dead canary in the coal mine and I should stay away. Even if Sweet Baby itself isn't the problem and doesn't hold much power, a company hiring them signals to me that the company cares about pushing ideological messaging and/or taking investments which have stipulations that impact the end product in ways that aren't in the interests of a large portion of customers.

I imagine they are not hired to make the game appeal to a certain audience, but to check if there are any “possible things that can offend whatever group of people “ in the script/game.
Which would make sense to me in this day and age when you are putting a multi-million dollar product on the market.

I really don’t believe Remedy hired them pre-production phase and asked “we want to make Twitter happy, what can we do here?”. And after 2 weeks they come back with: “make a 2nd character playable who is a black lesbian woman”.
Remedy: “that goes too far. How about a black heterosexual woman?”.
SBI: “sigh. Whatever, it’s your game. “

No chance.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

They hire them because that's one of the conditions for getting credit from certain institutions. "Your game doesn't get funding unless you hire X people in your team and X consultancy companies". Those companies are the spearhead of the big money funding movies/videogames and other entertainment media.

They sacrifice potential sales for short-term money to secure the project development.

 

[IllegalLemon]

This begs the question about why they are hiring these small consulting agencies in the first place if the company is just going to do whatever the fuck it wants anyway.
I personally think the simple act of hiring of such agencies like Sweet Baby represents a dead canary in the coal mine and I should stay away. Even if Sweet Baby itself isn't the problem and doesn't hold much power, a company hiring them signals to me that the company cares about pushing ideological messaging and/or taking investments which have stipulations that impact the end product in ways that aren't in the interests of a large portion of customers.

An even bigger question is, how many other consultation/support studios are there like SBI, that saw the pushback and backlash thrown at them by gamers and simply decided to keep their existence a secret, to avoid having to face the same criticism? Because, I doubt SBI is the only one out there. People say there's only 16 of them in SBI, but is that the whole story? I doubt it. There must be way more to SBI than some people are letting on.

 

[Guilty_AI]

This begs the question about why they are hiring these small consulting agencies in the first place if the company is just going to do whatever the fuck it wants anyway.

Consultancy in general is one of those services that exist as byproduct from corporate culture.

Basically you have one or multiple wannabe visionaries in a company that want to introduce new things, but this incur risks. Thus they hire a bunch of consultants to act as yes-men to all their ideas so that if it fails they can point to them, saying "the professionals gave the OK! It's not our fault!". Naturally if a serious consultant company denies their vision they'll just hire others until someone gives them green light.

In this case in particular, there are probably entities that also require the company to contract such consultants in order to get credit and funding.

 

[Hypereides]

Ladies and gentlemen, we have hit 400k.

 

[kikii]