A Canadian video game narrative consulting company is facing enormous backlash after trying to get a list of their projects taken down from Steam.
Sweet Baby Inc. is a consulting company that works with game writers to rewrite their plots to better fit with woke “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) standards. Like many industries, the American video game industry has become increasingly concerned with pleasing liberals in recent years, leading to numerous companies like Sweet Baby Inc.
Many of the games worked on by Sweet Baby Inc. are infamously bad, often flopping in sales and drawing ire due to bad writing.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leauge, for instance, was known for its terrible dialogue — influenced by Sweet Baby Inc. Another game, Alan Wake II, left players disappointed with the drastically reduced quality of the narrative, which paled in comparison to the depth of the first game. And, in popular game God of War: Ragnarok, fans were scratching their heads over ethnically diverse representations of ancient Norse gods.
Steam groups can be made by anyone, and frequently highlight a particular developer, composer, or publisher who has worked on the game. Sweet Baby Inc. employees, however, took offense to their company being featured, as gamers were using the collection of titles to boycott games with potentially shoddy writing.
Employees of Sweet Baby Inc. even called for the group and its moderator to be reported, hoping to pressure steam into taking down the “Sweet Baby Inc. Detected” page.
Unfortunately for Sweet Baby Inc., this movement backfired, with the posts calling for the group’s harassment deleted and Sweet Baby Inc.’s X account being locked. The publicity that Sweet Baby Inc. fueled has led to a huge increase in popularity for the Steam group.
Sweet Baby Inc detected just hit 100k followers on steam.
The harassment campaign to shutdown the list has backfired, they must have never heard of the Streisand effect. pic.twitter.com/X6xrzdCOfc
— MR. OBVIOUS (@ObviousRises) March 4, 2024
While Sweet Baby Inc. is just one of many companies filtering game narratives through the lens of DEI practices, users boycotting the company are showing the gaming industry that lazily “diverse” plots just won’t cut it. The “Sweet Baby Inc. Detected” Steam page even has a post in which users share better-written games that also happen to be diverse.
