Sweet Baby Inc. detected has surpassed 300,000 followers on Steam
The Steam Curator Group that lists games Sweet Baby Inc. has worked on continues to grow
📈 The Sweet Baby Inc. detected Steam Curator Group has now reached over 300,000 followers
📃 Sweet Baby Inc. detected lists every game Sweet Baby Inc. has been involved in
😤 The group has come under from gaming journalists and industry members
👶 However, some gamers have rallied around the group which was brought to light when a Sweet Baby Inc. employee tried to cancel it
‘Sweet Baby Inc. detected’ has now surpassed 300,000 members, making it the sixth most followed Steam Curator Group.
The group became the epicenter of what many are calling “Gamergame 2” after a Sweet Baby Inc. employee encouraged their followers to ban the group and its creator from Steam. The employee, named Chris Kindred, was ultimately unsuccessful and subsequently banned for targeted harassment on X for breaching the platform’s policies.
A clear divide has since formed between some gamers who believe that Sweet Baby Inc. has harmed their favorite pastime and gaming journalists who resolutely dispute that opinion.
Gamers have also accused journalists of missing key context in their coverage, such as Kindred’s targeted harassment, as well as failing to cover comments from past and present Sweet Baby Inc. employees.
For example, Sweet Baby Inc.’s CEO Kim Belair has previously said that developers should go for a coffee with their marketing team if “they don’t see the value of what you’re asking for when you ask for consultants” and “terrify them with the possibility of what’s gonna happen if they don’t give you what you want.”
An interview with an ex-Sweet Baby Inc. developer Dani LaLonders has also resurfaced where they admitted to only hiring people of color while working on their previous game, ValiDate. LaLonders said they “wanted to create a safe environment” and that “white people can be hard to work with… because they think that something may be okay, but it was really a microaggression.”
LaLonders has since become the associate narrative designer at Cliffhanger Games, an EA-owned studio that’s working on a game based on Marvel’s Black Panther, but is also accredited on the writing team on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a game which Sweet Baby Inc. denies having a huge involvement with.
According to an interview with Kotaku, Belair said the team “joined just to write in-game ads, audio logs, and NPC ‘barks’”, but the credits show a team of 13 people was involved in the game’s development.
Sweet Baby Inc.’s Wikipedia page has also come under scrutiny for missing key facts and for focusing on one side of events. It’s currently under extended confirmed protection, which only allows edits by editors with user access level and is granted to registered users whose accounts are 30 days old and with at least 500 edits on English Wikipedia.
Gaming journalists have argued that the Sweet Baby Inc. list is hateful and that it only exists as a means to let bigoted people avoid games that contain diverse characters and storylines. But gamers say it’s the way diversity is forced into titles that is the real problem, with needless race-swapping and political messaging as common examples of how Sweet Baby Inc. changes games unnecessarily.
The Sweet Baby Inc. detected group could end up in the top 5 most-followed Steam Curator Groups shortly if it carries on its current momentum, and it’s unlikely the debate regarding whether DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is being forced into video game development will end anytime soon.