What is Sweet Baby Inc. and why are people so angry about it? –

If you’re active in gaming circles on social media, you’ve probably heard of Sweet Baby Inc. before. If you don’t know at all, according to its website, Sweet Baby Inc. is a storytelling and consulting company based in Montreal. It has only been established since 2018, but since then it has worked on many games, including but not limited to God of War: Ragnarök, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

One of the services Sweet Baby Inc. can offer game studios is cultural and authenticity consultations. These include discussions on diversity and inclusion for people from minority backgrounds, ranging from many topics including race, gender, ethnicity and more.

Can you see where some gamers might have a problem with this? In recent times, we have seen the emergence of a Sweet Baby Inc. Detected Steam curator group, which serves to inform gamers about titles the studio has been working on. At the time of writing, the Sweet Baby Inc. Detected Steam group has more than 200,000 members, which begs the question of why so many gamers are actively avoiding anything Sweet Baby Inc. related.
The answer is quite simple. It’s the same reason why a certain group rolls their eyes when a studio dares to include characters of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations or anything else that falls under the meaningless blanket of “woke. We see it more and more often now, because it seems like the counterculture is determined to blame every failure, every title earning mediocre reviews about the fact that the women weren’t stripped down to their underwear and the men weren’t all white and pumped up with so much juice that a paper cut could make them look low.

It is a strange and often misinformed argument to point to the failure of a game as purely behind “woke. If we take Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as our most recent example, there are a myriad of reasons why people didn’t rush to get a copy of that game. The battles were nothing like what made the previous Arkham games great, the story was not a key factor compared to the overly pushed, tedious and unnecessary live-service mechanics, and while some of the writing remained fast-paced and funny, especially where Captain Boomerang was concerned, there was an overall lack of soul in Rocksteady’s latest outing that left players feeling lukewarm at best.

There are some – seemingly very few – people making good faith arguments against Sweet Baby Inc. Many worry that by inviting a storytelling consultancy into the writers’ room, you are spoiling the pot with too many cooks. While there is some merit in the idea that you would get a clearer vision with fewer heads coming together to create a story, ultimately Sweet Baby Inc. is not the only outsourcing that exists in the world of game development, and it is far too easily attacked as a scapegoat for everything wrong in gaming. It is ironic that the crowd that often prides itself on being the real critics of the media resorts to the same rule of “woke equals bad” time and time again, without engaging in the proper critique of what works and what doesn’t in any given text.
Rumors and misinformation are rife in this controversy over Sweet Baby Inc. It leads to harassment of studio employees and the spreading of stories that are completely false. One rumor stated that if not for Sweet Baby Inc., Saga Anderson would have been white in Alan Wake 2, a statement that game director Kyle Rowley confirmed as false on Twitter/X. Forced diversity is a controversial topic in gaming alone, and the people who want to see less diversity would love it if they had one person, one studio, to blame for it all, similar to how Anita Sarkeesian took a large amount of heat during Gamergate, but unfortunately for that party, things are never that simple.

Sweet Baby Inc. focuses largely on stories and dialogue. The reaction we’re seeing now, the calls to remove the studio from the gaming industry, is mostly a reductive response to a non-existent problem being fabricated as a catastrophic problem in gaming and the West as a whole. If you really have a problem with Sweet Baby Inc. or just don’t want to see diversity and inclusion in your games, no one is forcing you to do that. We live in a time when so many games are released in a year that you’ll probably never be able to get that one title that’s been in your backlog for years, so make the choice to play what you like instead of spending time whining about a woman having more than 5 lines, or not being responsive to your own preferences.

If you had never heard of Sweet Baby Inc. before coming here and were afraid it would lead to some kind of industry collapse, don’t worry. Even if you are not a fan of the games it has worked on, there are many more you can play and Sweet Baby will not spread a game-wide epidemic where all your games have the same stories. There are lots of problems in this industry now, much bigger ones, so it’s probably best to focus on those rather than a virtual woman’s cup size.