Shareholder Questions Square Enix’s Use of Sweet Baby Inc.
The word is out on Sweet Baby Inc., and it’s not good. There have been signs in recent months that the consulting firm that helped destroy Rocksteady’s Arkham series with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (which was directly blamed for Warner Bros. losing $200 million in its first quarter) was becoming a liability to game developers. The biggest indication was when one reached out to Kabrutus, owner of the Sweet Baby Inc. Detected Steam curator and the DEI Detected website, and told him they were eliminating every part of an upcoming game that had Sweet Baby Inc.’s fingerprints on it. Now, we’ve got another; during a recent earnings call at Square Enix, a shareholder asked about whether the company was a client of Sweet Baby Inc. and if they would continue to be one in the future:
Takashi Kiryu, the president of Square Enix, gave this answer:
I don’t think much will come of this, but it’s a big step that individual investors are now aware of Sweet Baby Inc. and the trouble it brings to the games on which it consults and that the Square Enix president didn’t want to admit the company had hired them. It’s understandable; as That Park Place points out, Square Enix used another woke consulting firm, Black Girl Gamers, on the action RPG Forspoken, and that game bombed so badly that Square Enix shut down and absorbed its developer, Luminous Productions. A smart company would stop doing business with these grifters, but the entertainment industry – be it video games, movies, or whatever else – is so invested in woke messaging and social engineering that it’s doing everything it can to hang onto DEI consulting firms and anyone else who will implement the ideology in their products. But they do at least recognize how unpopular it is, and while it seems likely Square Enix is still going to use Sweet Baby Inc. and similar consulting firms, they’re not going to say it out loud if they can help it. And now, investors are starting to be concerned with the situation, so pressure may be coming from that direction as well. Baby steps.
