Sweet Baby Inc. Goes After Steam Curator
Sweet Baby Inc. doesn’t want you to know what games it helps produce. The company, which acts as a creative consultant on video games, most recently helped craft the story and cinematics for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. That game was so hated that it encouraged gamers to look into Sweet Baby Inc.’s history of video game “narrative consultation,” and they noticed a pattern of identity politics being injected into these games. So, according to a story from NicheGamer, a Steam user created a curator that tells users which games Sweet Baby Inc. was involved in developing. Well, some Sweet Baby Inc. Employees are none too thrilled with this, and one of them has been calling for the curator and the user who created it to be banned from Steam, encouraging people to mass report him. The particular employee is Chris Kindred, a “narrative designer,” who made X posts requesting the mass reporting. Those posts appear to have been deleted, but you can see screenshots of them in the NicheGamer story.
Another Sweet Baby Inc. Employee, Felix Kramer (who describes himself as “consulting”), stopped short of calling for mass reporting, but he suggested that the curator could say any game was a Sweet Baby Inc. game, even ones the company had nothing to do with. When a community note pointed out that the curator reported Sweet Baby Inc. games accurately, he acted as smugly as these people always do and suggested they were “defensive” for correcting his lies about them:
for example, @Steam doesn’t have guidelines for curators (as far as i can tell) that would prevent someone from starting a curation group that focuses on, say, @SweetBabyInc and…warns people to not buy games they’re associated with? which could just list any game at all?? pic.twitter.com/ZP2nSegZAM
— felix at home (@legobutts) February 29, 2024
it’s pretty funny to see a note on my steam curator post, i guess they need to defend themselves because they’re completely wrong about everything sweet baby (or any narrative team) does and have no interest in finding out!
— felix at home (@legobutts) March 1, 2024
As always, one side of the divide’s go-to solution is to get anyone they don’t like or disagree with silenced and removed. Mass reporting is a particularly nasty tool for this, stirring up an angry mob (albeit an angry mob wielding keyboards instead of torches) to pressure companies and platforms into disappearing their targets. It also doesn’t address the underlying problem for Sweet Baby Inc., which is that enough people see their name as a sign of bad quality that a curator of their involvement in video games is gaining traction. But I think they know this, which is why they’re going after this Steam user so hard. Mr. H made a good point in his video on the topic: if their games are not the problem, why would they care about a curator like this? Wouldn’t people knowing they were involved be a good thing? (I mean, they list the games on their website for all to see.) But they know Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a massive failure, they know gamers are blaming them, and they know a smart video game studio wouldn’t work with them in the future. They can’t argue the merits because Kill the Justice League isn’t well-liked by the few people who actually played it (like poor Mauler), so all they’ve got left is intimidation.
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