This is a follow-up editorial to my Sweet Baby Inc editorial. A lot has happened in the days since I dropped it, and there hasn’t been a lot of new Switch games that caught my interest so I’ll write a follow up. Essentially, the Sweet Baby meltdown over the steam group exposing it has blown up into something bigger. And the friends of Sweet Baby Inc, namely Kotaku Writer Alyssa Mercante, decided to fire back with a fluff piece where she reveals she “infiltrated” the SBI detected discord, where she wondered why people weren’t using their real names and pictures so she could dox them:

But here’s the thing, while her tweet about the Kotaku article blew up, the article itself is largely irrelevant. It hasn’t dampened the backlash against sweet baby. If anything, it inflamed it. This is in stark contrast to the “Gamers are over” article slew that appeared after Gamergate in 2014(like this one). That slew had a major cultural impact, shifting that narrative away from what the backlash was really about(corruption in games journalism) to being about harassment. But now, it will have no effect because proper games journalism websites are dying, the focus shifting to actual gamers discussing games on Youtube and Twitch.

Kotaku is Dying

In the beginning, gaming websites were run by nerds for nerds. Then these websites were taken over by woke game journalists. We saw the early murmuring of the shift with Gone Home, where woke journalists propped a woke game made for them(read that review for a more in-depth discussion). Then gamergate proper hit in 2014, which was kind of a loss for gamers as things became much worse in the industry, as the wokeness seeped into the games themselves. But here’s what’s different: Kotaku and it’s ilk don’t have the power they once did. They are dying.

There are recent massive layoffs of games journalists, as sites fold and are sold. They just aren’t profitable and never really were. They were propped up with venture capitalist money, and that money has dried up. And when these sites have to be profitable they can’t survive(Full disclosure: This site is not profitable either, but this is a hobby for me, not my actual job). Kotaku has largely shifted away from wokeness(for the most part), because they have to. Nobody goes on websites looking for reviews or gaming opinions much anymore. I only get traffic because I’m in a particular niche where a gaming review of obscure games stand out in a google search.

Kotaku will probably fold sooner or later. They get traffic by using clickbait, but even that’s probably wearing thin. I give them another year or two, and they’ll be kaput. They’re running on fumes.

Conclusion

I don’t know where the flare-up over Sweet Baby will end up, but one thing is for certain: that Sweet Baby’s friends like Kotaku won’t have much effect. However, the rot goes deep. People need to speak with their wallets, otherwise this flare-up will have no effect. Don’t buy woke games. Put the companies who use consultants like Sweet Baby out of business. That is the only way change will happen. As Kotaku and the games media are no longer relevant, that message can be sent loud and clear. You know what to do. Do it!

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Sweet Baby Inc is a gaming consulting firm based out of Canada. They exist to “tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry.” They have notable clients including most western AAA publishers including Microsoft and EA and a whole host of others. Take a look:

Sweet Baby Inc has worked on a ton of recent notable projects. Take a look:

Recently, Sweet Baby Inc has come under fire from gamers for “helping create woke games.”(they locked their twitter feed down as a result) When you get a Sweet Baby game, you’re essentially getting Gone Home, a game not made for the average person, but woke game journalists to slobber over. Now it is worth to stop here and define “woke.” Woke to me is adhering to far-left DEI and social justice principals and advancing those things through something in the name of an agenda. There is a meme floating around of a guy calling an engine woke.

Now, this meme misses the point. The engine cannot be woke. However, the company making the engine certainly can be. If an agenda can be pushed through it, it is woke. If it cannot, it is not. Now that we have defined woke, we need to talk about the modern audience.

Sweet Baby Inc’s Quest

What is the “Modern Audience?” Woke people would tell you the modern audience is what current people who make up an audience want to see. That society has advanced to the point they want to see fat disabled lesbians in the title role, for example. This is what Sweet Baby Inc seeks. The term doesn’t appear on their page, but its what they mean by, “We aim to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.” The reality is, the modern audience does not exist. How do I know? Look at Hollywood and the Flopbuster. While not every flopbuster is woke, many are, especially the biggest ones, including Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny and the Marvels. The Critical Drinker has a good video on it. He ends off buy saying the modern audiences are really what the woke people want to see, not what the average person does. He would be correct.

The modern audience is a myth. The audience hasn’t really changed, they still want what they’ve always wanted: Good stories and good characters. Having a fat disabled lesbian in the lead isn’t necessary a bad thing. However, they don’t make good action heroes. You need a strong capable person who embodies heroic qualities, and you generally don’t find it in woke things. So, this leads us to Sweet Baby Inc’s recent meltdown.

The Meltdown

Recently Sweet Baby Inc went after a Steam Curator who created a group who alerts people to what Sweet Baby works on. They wanted him gone. It seems to have backfired, with the steam curator exploding in following. Why is Sweet Baby doing this? I think they’re no longer getting future work, and they’re getting desperate to convince suits to hire them. But once publishers get the cold hard numbers, and find out the modern audience not only does not exist, but the audience that does hates your product, they will change course. Many of the games Sweet Baby Inc worked were failures, including Saint’s Row, Suicide Squad, Forespoken, and Spider-man 2. Now in the case of Spider-man, that had to do with the budget more than wokeness, but I know the word of mouth was not great because of the wokeness. Studios have to be paying attention, and they can’t be happy.

In the end, Sweet Baby Inc is flailing and will probably fade away after the current crop of games they are working on are released, and invariably fail. The modern audience is actually the old audience, and the old audience doesn’t want them and what their pedaling. Good riddance.

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