Sweet Baby Inc.-Influenced Tales of Kenzera: ZAU Bombs

Video Games

The evidence is rolling in that Kabrutus and his Sweet Baby Inc. Detected curator are having a tangible impact on the video game industry. This week saw the release of a game called Tales of Kenzera: ZAU from developer Surgent Studios, published by Electronic Arts. In January, Sweet Baby Inc. revealed that they consulted on Tales of Kenzera, so Kabrutus added it to the list on his curator. The results are not good for Surgent Studios or Electronic Arts, but they’re disastrous for Sweet Baby Inc.: according to SteamDB, on the day of its release, Tales of Kenzera had 287 concurrent players on Steam at its peak. That peak went down to 211 concurrent players in just two days. To get a sense of how bad that is, people were calling time of death on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League when it dropped to 945 players, and those weren’t even peak numbers. As for sales, the sites SteamDB monitors have units sold at between 2,670 on the low end and an estimated 7,600 on the high end. The high-end tally is the median of a range of 3,800-11,400; if you take the highest number in that range, the sales top out at $132,200 in gross revenue. These are early estimates, to be fair, but how much could that number really go up?

This is why developers and games journalists hate Kabrutus so much. It’s hard to argue that Sweet Baby Inc. Detected and the fanfare surrounding it didn’t contribute to Tales of Kenzera tanking. That curator has more followers than the game has customers, and not by a little; Sweet Baby Inc. Detected has 379,733 followers as of this writing, more than thirty times the maximum number of buyers for Tales of Kenzera. That’s a lot of gamers who are skipping games based on Sweet Baby Inc.’s involvement in them, and it doesn’t factor in people who haven’t followed the curator but agree about DEI consulting firms or people who don’t have the whole picture but know the name Sweet Baby Inc. and what it stands for. That spells trouble for Sweet Baby Inc., and according to Kabrutus, game developers were already starting to see that they’re more trouble than they’re worth; after a disaster like this, that sentiment is going to skyrocket because video games are simply too expensive to gamble on something this unpopular. Meanwhile, there’s Stellar Blade, a game that caught fire in large part because it was free of this stuff, and it drove the people who push DEI insane just by existing. There’s a feeling of sticking it to the man in supporting something like Stellar Blade and skipping a game like Tales of Kenzera or Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and that feeling is infectious when identity politics is beating down every door in the entertainment landscape. People don’t like to be told what to do (most people, anyway), especially when they’re trying to have fun, and by and large, gamers are rooting for Al Czervik to take Judge Smails down a peg.