X Community Notes Quickly Destroys Game Developer's Blatant Propaganda And Attempts To Censor To Support Sweet Baby Inc.'s Lies
Community Notes on X quickly rebuffed a propaganda and censorship piece written to attack gamers and support Sweet Baby Inc. that was published by Game Developer and written by Bryant Francis.
Game Developer reposted an article written by Francis and titled “Why are Valve and Discord permitting harassment against Sweet Baby Inc.?” that was published by Game Developer back in March.
In the article, Francis falsely claims that “Sweet Baby Inc. has become the target of an online harassment campaign for its consulting work on games like Alan Wake 2, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
As for why he claims this is happening he explains, “Users on websites like Twitter and Kiwi Farm … have singled out the agency for allegedly having overarching influence on these games, and accused it of forcibly injecting a "political agenda" into them by advocating for diversity.”
He then claims this is all a “grim conspiracy theory built on out-of-context comments and a deliberate misreading of their mission statement, as well as racism, homophobia, and other layers of bigotry.”
READ: Long-Time BioWare Writer Leaves Company Following 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard's' Apparent Flop
However, this is not a conspiracy theory and people are not taking Belair’s comments out-of-context.
In a 2019 Game Developer’s Conference presentation, Belair was quite clear what her company’s goal was, “None of what we’re doing is about ticking boxes or about a veneer of wokeness. We actually have to care about making this stuff.”
She also encouraged employees in AAA to terrify their upper management so they will hire woke consultants like her to wokify the games.
She said, “If you’re creative working in AAA, which I did for many years, put this stuff up to your higher-ups. And if they don’t see the value and what you’re asking for when you ask for consultants, when you ask for research, go have a coffee with your marketing team and just terrify them with the possibility of what’s going to happen if they don’t give you what you want.”
“Because they have to consider– I say that out loud as a joke, but it’s actually very, very true because if you start to consider the people who are player and audience facing and you have to deal with mitigating harm and with keeping the sentiment around their game and their project positive, there’s like a genuine value that you could impress upon them both ethically and financially. You could say this is important,” she said.
Belair elaborated, “It’s also a valid discussion to have because if you’re working with a thin narrative budget and you work in AAA, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised or dismayed by the amount of money that marketing can give you.”
Since the publishing of the article, it’s also been revealed that Sweet Baby Inc. wanted to burn the video game industry to the ground.
A Sweet Baby Inc. employee, who uses the name Camerin Wild, gave a presentation at The Game Developers of Color Expo. On one slide titled, “Cool, so why am I here?” a bullet point states, “Burning the games industry to the ground.”
READ: 'The Witcher 4' Game Director And Narrative Director Respond To Trailer Backlash And Criticism
Furthermore, the so-called harassment campaign that Francis claims Sweet Baby Inc. has been subjected was actually a harassment campaign against Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo and was started by Sweet Baby Inc. employees.
Another Sweet Baby Inc. employee Chris Kindred targeted the Steam curator group and KabrutusRambo’s personal Steam account writing on X back at the end of February, “The Steam curator harassment group Sweet Baby Inc detected is lead by this person, kabrutusrambo. Here’s them trying to be slick so they don’t get reported. Even with the discriminatory language filed off, the group itself still fails the code of conduct.”
Kindred added, “anyway report the f*** out of this group.”
Finally, Kindred concluded, “And report the creator since he loves his account so much.”
Another Sweet Baby Inc. employee Maya Kramer also called for “those with authority” to step in and censor the Steam curator list.
Kramer wrote on X, “sorry no one thing has changed: the number of people who understand that spreading misinformation just lets them be racist in public with no consequence has increased dramatically. that has changed. probably requires some fighting from those with authority! probably. :(”
She added, “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??”
Despite much of this evidence already being apparent at the time of publishing, Bryant ignored it and called for Steam and Discord to censor Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo, who created the Steam curator.
He wrote, “The steps both companies have taken to moderate these groups appear to have had some effect, but allowing them to remain online serves the organizers' overarching purpose: recruiting ‘normies’ with little knowledge of game development to capitalize on their anger and channel them into directing hate speech toward Sweet Baby Inc. and anyone else pressing for inclusivity in video games and beyond.”
“If those loopholes aren't closed, those bad actors will have learned they can target other developers, and this will be the beginning of another massive hate campaign that will leave our industry and its people worse for wear,” he concluded.
Given all of this evidence, Game Developer’s repost of the March article was quickly community noted. The company initially posted, “When Sweet Baby Inc. was targeted for their advocacy efforts earlier this year, a Discord server and a Steam community group played a role in their harassment. We ask, do Valve and Discord consider this within their terms of service? #GDBestof2024.”
The Community Note responded, “It does not violate Valve and Discord TOS, as the main goal of the server is simply listing out games that SBI is involved with. On the other hand, SBI employees who targeted that discord server and it's owner had violated a bunch of TOS.”
What do you make of X Community Notes shutting down Game Developer’s blatant piece of propaganda and call to censorship the truth?
NEXT: Sweet Baby Inc. Infected 'Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance' To Shut Down
If the main ingredient of your article is a lengthy quote of someone discussing "AAA," it would help a lot if you informed the reader WTF "AAA" stands for.
HTH.
This woke crap ruins games.