Third-party narrative consultation company Sweet Baby Inc. is on the backfoot after their attempts at getting a Steam Curator banned from the platform sparked an immense backlash from the gaming community. Read on to learn more about the situation.
Sweet Baby Inc. Throws a Tantrum Against Curated Steam List
We might be looking at a civil war among gamers on our hands. Sweet Baby Inc. (SBI)—a third-party narrative consultation company based in Canada—is being pummeled by gamers across social media and other digital platforms like Steam for their recent attempts at getting the creator of an allegedly defamatory curated Steam list banned.
The curated Steam list—appropriately named "Sweet Baby Inc. detected"—accurately listed all games that the company worked with across many clients, including EA, Wizards of the Coast, Ubisoft, and most recently, Rocksteady. The SteamGroup page hosting the list was created by Steam user Kabrutus and nearly has 200,000 followers at the time of writing.
Sweet Baby Inc. Employee Calls to Mass Report "Sweet Baby Inc. Detected"
Despite Sweet Baby Inc. detected’s (SBID) use of publicly available information and intent to warn users in a manner similar to other Steam Curator Pages warning of censorship, its focus on Sweet Baby Inc.’s work, in particular, has led to public outcry from SBI employees.
The first was a consultant who worked for SBI named Maya Felix Kramer (@legobutts). She voiced her objection to SBID through a lengthy Twitter thread addressing allegations that SBI was responsible for recent industry layoffs.
"I get to see a lot of tweets somehow blaming ‘diversity’ as the reason for layoffs genuinely as if the economy was doing really great and capitalism simply worked before Miles Morales was Spider-Man* (*they also don’t recognize Miles as Spider-Man)" wrote Kramer.
"The weirdest part is when [I] see these takes from developers or people who have dev bios at least," she added. "idk it seems wild that a dev would see thousands of layoffs and blame not the industry giants but instead a 15 person narrative company founded by a black woman."
The second SBI employee to address SBID’s existence was Sweet Baby Inc. writer Chris Kindred (@itskindred), who took a more direct approach by directly telling his followers to mass report SBID and have both the group and its creator removed from the platform.
"The @Steam curator harassment group Sweet Baby Inc detected is lead by this person, @kabrutusrambo," wrote Kindred in a Twitter (X) post. "Here’s them trying to be slick so they don’t get reported. Even with the discriminatory language filed off, the group itself still fails the code of conduct."
The post itself included screenshots of Kabrutus allegedly confirming that he started the list "to make people aware of those who try to corrupt our beloved hobby" and his intent to use fewer "loaded words" to prevent the group from being banned or reported.
Kindred followed up the post by asking his followers to "report the f***k out of this group" and "report the creator since he loves his account so much." This final act of petty defiance may have been the catalyst for the gaming community’s uproarious response, which skyrocketed the situation to internet infamy.
Sweet Baby Inc. Gets Pummeled by the Gaming Community
In a classic display of the Streisand effect—a name given to a sudden public interest in any given information due to an overt attempt at hiding it in the first place—SBID’s follower count blew past the stratosphere, increasing from a little over 9,000 followers to nearly 200,000 in two days.
This sudden increase in followers was likely due in no small part to Kramer and Kindred’s efforts to run Kabrutus off the platform. What should have been a death sentence for any other user suddenly beset by the hounds of public scrutiny quickly became the reason so many were able to rally. Kindred has since deleted all of his Tweets concerning the situation and set his account to private. Similarly, the official Sweet Baby Inc. Twitter (X) account has also locked its account.
Kabrutus (@kabrutusrambo) seems unperturbed by his sudden internet fame, proving himself both amicable and open to discussion about the situation with SBI. Kabrutus was notably seen in a recent interview with Twitch juggernaut Asmongold, where he shed more light on the topic.
Sweet Baby Inc.’s Other Controversies
Gamers across Reddit and Twitter (X) continue to lambast SBI for the chest-beating of its employees, though this is far from being their only offense to the community in recent memory. February’s controversial Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League—an entry to the Arkhamverse that was widely panned for its design and narrative issues— was one of their more recent projects, made in collaboration with Rocksteady.
SBI’s collaboration with Wizards of the Coast—famed originator of Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons—also sparked discourse in mid-2023, when a crossover with J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle-Earth universe depicted Aragorn as a person of color.
To add fuel to the proverbial flame, a recent post by Twitter (X) user @GamesNosh showed SBI Co-founder Kim Belair’s speech from a Game Developers Conference back in 2019. In it, Belair "proudly explains the method she uses to force bosses at game studios to censor, alter, and ‘diversify’ game projects she feels are problematic,"— a method @GamesNosh likened to "threatening [others] with the anger of the cancel culture mob."
Although it’s easy to point at SBI’s mission to promote diversity and inclusion in its writing projects as the main cause of the uproar, it’s more likely that the grievances caused by its employees’ actions fueled the flame.
Sources:
The Sweet Baby Inc. Controversy on Know Your Meme
Sweet Baby Inc. Staff Throw Tantrum After Steam Curator List Created To Track, Warn Players Against Their Work
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Great article, goes to show there are still good people showing the full unbiased story of what is happening.