Sony Canceling Sweet Baby Inc. Games?
All eyes are on Nintendo and their new Switch 2 system right now, but Sony may be doing even more to help the video game industry behind the scenes. Gothic Therapy, the YouTube channel run by husband and wife team MasteroftheTDS and Writing Raven, recently reported that Sony has canceled a bunch of contracts for games that have Sweet Baby Inc. attached to them. If you don’t remember the name, Sweet Baby Inc. is the consulting firm that is largely blamed for infusing the games they’re hired to consult on with stupid, woke garbage. They’re only one of many such firms, but they were dragged into the limelight when their work on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was blamed for that game’s massive failure. Since then, more information about Sweet Baby Inc. has come to light, such as their CEO’s use of underhanded methods to get video game developers to hire them. Then, Kabrutus started a Steam curator called Sweet Baby Inc. Detected, which lists all the games that use Sweet Bay Inc.’s consulting services. (Kabrutus has since branched out with a more comprehensive website called DEI Detected.) Since their exposure, games with Sweet Baby Inc.’s involvement have consistently bombed, the latest being South of Midnight. Well, apparently, at least one company has had enough, and according to Gothic Therapy’s inside source in Sweet Baby Inc., Sony wants them out:
The list MasteroftheTDS and Writing Raven posted in that video has some big names. A new God of War game getting canceled is huge, as that’s one of Sony’s premier franchises right now. I’m sure a new one will be made at some point, but a delay means either that it was an offshoot of the main series they can do without or the sequel was on the wrong track and needs to be fixed before it goes into development. Spider-Man: The Great Web was going to be a live-service multiplayer game featuring various Spider-People from the Spider-Verse, like Miles Morales (as if there were any doubt), Spider-Gwen, Spider-Man 2099, and more. The leaked trailer, which I’ll embed below, made it look like the game was very much in line with the Insomniac Spider-Man games of the past several years, with reused villains and similar gameplay. It did noticeably seem like Peter Parker was absent; I think that was him doing the voiceover narration, but I didn’t see him in any of the actual gameplay. That seems to dovetail with the ending of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (which I didn’t play, but I’ve seen the ending online), in which Peter Parker retires so Miles Morales can be the only Spider-Man. Interestingly, while removing Peter for Miles was clearly the intention, Peter’s voice actor, Yuri Lowenthal, later revealed that Peter would be a more active participant than people assumed, which suggests that this sea change had been in the works for a while.
If what Gothic Therapy is reporting is true, it’s the result of no longer being able to afford one’s indulgences. These companies love their identity politics, but when the customer stops buying your product, you have to remember which of you is supposed to be “always right.” According to That Park Place, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 sold about half of what Marvel’s Spider-Man sold, suggesting that people aren’t as jazzed about Miles Morales as Sony, Insomniac, and Marvel clearly want them to be. Similarly, God of War Ragnarök, which had Sweet Baby Inc. attached to it, wasn’t played nearly as often as the previous game. But the biggest hit had to be Concord, the game Sony wanted to start a Star Wars-like franchise but was such a devastating failure that it was canceled two weeks after its release, and Sony later closed in-house developer Firewalk Studios. A company like Sony can’t maintain that kind of pattern; they have to course-correct, and if Gothic Therapy is right, they’re finally doing that.
Let us know what you think about Sony canceling games linked to Sweet Baby Inc. in the comments!
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