Is Sweet Baby Inc. Connected to Assassin’s Creed Shadows?
You’ve probably heard the suggestion that Sweet Baby Inc. was involved in developing Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the new Ubisoft game that takes place in feudal Japan and has a black man and a woman as the lead characters. I mostly wrote this off because the evidence amounted to little more than the game’s lead writer following the consulting firm’s X account. Not that it matters; there are plenty of people and entities in the video game industry that think and operate exactly like Sweet Baby Inc., so their presence isn’t necessary to woke-ify a game. And as for the follow, well, birds of a feather and all. But some new things are coming to light that make me wonder if something more is going on. Today, @MangaLawyer posted this:
Meet the diverse team of Assassin's Creed Shadows! From the narrative director and lead writer to the level designers, the team embodies diversity most unexpectedly—a group of white Western liberal women who seem to dislike their skin 😍😆 pic.twitter.com/J9ZuUgda1N
— LearningTheLaw (@Mangalawyer) May 19, 2024
See the lady peeking out behind that woman with the sky-blue (though partly cloudy) hair? Here’s a closer look:
Bro, I forgot Sweet Baby founder is a former Ubisoft Employee. It's her lmao pic.twitter.com/1MYIhYpaRI
— LearningTheLaw (@Mangalawyer) May 19, 2024
Yep, that’s Kim Belair, CEO and co-founder of Sweet Baby Inc. – the one who encouraged employees of video game companies to “terrify” their marketing team into adopting DEI practices. I couldn’t verify the caption on the first photo, so I’m not sure if this is specifically a shot of the Assassin’s Creed Shadows team (although it wouldn’t surprise me). But apparently, Kim Belair used to work for Ubisoft, and she is credited as a writer on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and a few of its DLC expansions. Now, here’s where it gets interesting: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is not listed on the Sweet Baby Inc. website. However, Sweet Baby Inc. was created in 2018, two years before Valhalla’s release. Moreover, Valhalla is listed on Kabrutus’ Sweet Baby Inc. Detected curator, with a note that it used to be listed on the Sweet Baby Inc. website but was taken down.
Again, this doesn’t mean Sweet Baby Inc. worked on Assassin’s Creed Shadows, or even that Kim Belair did so independently. (Development on Shadows began in 2020, after Sweet Baby Inc. was established, so it’s likely she would have worked on it as part of SBI, if she did at all.) But it makes you wonder if something more is going on. Sweet Baby Inc.’s name is an albatross around the necks of game developers now, to such an extent that Kabrutus has talked about one dev who told him they used Sweet Baby Inc. but were expunging everything they consulted on from the game in the hopes that he wouldn’t add them to Sweet Baby Inc. Detected. It seems odd that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla disappeared from the website just before the next game in the series debuted its trailer, amid the consulting firm’s name becoming a major turnoff for customers. After seeing things like Wikipedia editors rewriting history to protect Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Games Workshop editing Warhammer 40K’s lore to pretend their addition of female Custodes was always a thing, it wouldn’t surprise me that Sweet Baby Inc. would throw Ubisoft a bone and try to hide their involvement in the company’s hit series. That doesn’t seem like a great deal for Sweet Baby Inc. on the surface, but if their name really is mud now, maybe the best they can hope for is to work under the radar.
This is just guesswork, though. Until anything official comes out, nobody outside of Ubisfot and Sweet Baby Inc. knows about any collaboration on Assassin’s Creed Shadows. But there’s more shifty stuff going on than it initially looked like there was.
Comments (3)
I’m pretty sure Belair runs the Assassin’s Creed subreddit and/or the related Discord.
You will get autobanned if you mention this terrible company in either one.
I can’t wait for this game to lose millions of dollars.
I found this while conducting research into Sweet Baby Inc., the games its impacted, and the quality of said impact. Them having worked on this travesty of historical retconning would have made that much easier. Unfortunately what I found was an article so lacking in journalistic integrity and steeped in bias that I have to roast it. Too many stupid people/institutions out here pretending to be legitimate journalists while pushing a biased narrative that inherently undermines their bipartisanship and, as a result, their integrity.
The blatant irony here is that “Sweet Baby Inc. Detected” is just as bad as Sweet Baby Inc. as it’s committing the exact same type of strongarming companies into submitting to their demands out of fear. This is made evident by the quote ” Kabrutus has talked about one dev who told him they used Sweet Baby Inc. but were expunging everything they consulted on from the game in the hopes that he wouldn’t add them to Sweet Baby Inc. Detected.” Making it blatantly obvious that the overarching goal of Sweet Baby Inc. Detected is to censor diverse representation using Sweet Baby Inc. as the scapegoat to do so. The reality is that Sweet Baby Inc.’s business model of aiding in accurate diverse representation in video games is perfectly fine, but the fact that it has a couple loud bad actors spewing toxic rhetoric gives biased individuals with malicious intent reason to paint the business as a whole as terrible (the classic taking the actions of the few to punish the many). So far, in my research, I have yet to find any example of the Sweet Baby Inc. actually failing at the goal of “accurate diverse representation” (hence why i came here looking for a smoking gun). This indicates that, so far, the crusade against them is based entirely on a hate mob being triggered by the aforementioned bad actors rather than the merits of the business itself.
This also has nothing to do with DEI as DEI is a concept that applies to employment, not video game storytelling. Bad writers are responsible for the tokenization of minorities to use their image to forcibly inject political rhetoric into a game/narrative that doesn’t actually need it and/or isn’t actually about it. Not DEI. You’re using DEI as a dogwhistle rather than using it in its proper context.
DEI is actually very simple: Say you need to hire 100 people but you have 300 qualified applicants. 170 are white and the other 130 are not. Again, all are qualified as they wouldn’t be under consideration if they weren’t. DEI is there to prevent companies from applying discriminatory ideals to their hiring process so those minorities actually have a chance to get a job and build a life in a country that apparently would otherwise seek to demonize them (as is evident by the mere existence of Sweet Baby Inc. Detected and the language usage in this very article). Therefore, being anti DEI is to inherently be racist as the entire argument for anti DEI is that it allows “unqualified people to be hired” which relies entirely on painting anyone who isn’t white as “unqualified”. Falling for anti DEI rhetoric demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding regarding politics and as such is a litmus test for stupidity.
You also misuse the word “woke” (also as a dogwhistle) and ultimately came to no real conclusion at the end of this article. While I’ll give you that you did fairly thorough research on this highly specific investigation and even admitted that you came to no real conclusion. It has to be acknowledged that this article is, as a whole, pretty fucking stupid and lacking in self-awareness. I’ve exhibited better research and a better understanding of the concepts and the dynamics of the groups being mentioned in the article, in the literal comment section. In other words:
Git Gud
Great research and find.