Sweet Baby Inc: How a DEI Firm Is Taking Over Games

Microsoft. Warner Bros. Electronic Arts.

These are only some of the major corporations who appear on the list of clients for Sweet Baby Inc: a DEI consulting firm that some video game players believe is reshaping the industry.

Sweet Baby Inc was only founded in 2018, but its clients now include Xbox, Microsoft’s dominant video game platform and subscription service, Warner Bros, whose video game arm publishes Batman and Harry Potter games, Electronic Arts, which is behind the Battlefield series, the NFL, NHL and FIFA soccer franchises, the Sims franchise, as well as Star Wars games, Ubisoft, the makers of the popular Assassin’s Creed series, Square Enix, makers of Final Fantasy, and Wizards of the Coast, who control the Dungeons and Dragons franchise.

As well as Valve whose monopolistic Steam platform controls 75% of global video game sales.

Of the top 10 best-selling games in 2023, 8 were published by studios that were either affiliated with Sweet Baby Inc. or that, after Microsoft’s takeover of much of the industry, now are. The consolidation of the gaming industry and the embrace of DEI by top gaming companies has made it virtually impossible for video and computer game players to escape DEI’s reach.

What is the secret of Sweet Baby’s success in hijacking a multi-billion dollar industry?

In a presentation at the Game Developers Conference, co-founder Kim Belair urged gaming company employees to form relationships with marketing people, urge them to bring in consultants and then “terrify them with what could happen if they don’t give you what you want.”

Terrifying the marketing departments for some of the biggest gaming companies in the world seems to be working.

But what does Sweet Baby Inc. actually do?

According to the DEI firm, it begins with “an all hands review” of the project followed by rewriting it. Sweet Baby Inc boasts that its people “aren’t afraid of breaking something down to build it back up.” And what they offer is “sensitivity readings”, the same process that led to the rewriting of classic books by everyone from Ian Fleming to Agatha Christie, to “risk” assessment.

Gamers claim to have spotted the results of Sweet Baby’s involvement in Assassin Creed: Red, a game featuring a black samurai in 17th century Japan, and Suicide Squad, featuring a character that appeared to be modeled on anti-civilization activist Greta Thunberg.

While the degree of Sweet Baby’s involvement in remaking games remains opaque, the company claims to handle every area of writing, from creating characters to writing dialogue to world building, reinventing everything for the sake of “inclusivity” and “diversity”. Players however describe seeing favorite franchises ruined and characters transformed, displaced or inserted to fulfill a political agenda along with a severe drop in quality and enjoyability.

That’s why some players created lists of games to avoid because of Sweet Baby’s involvement.

The Steam ‘curator’, one list of games on which Sweet Baby consulted, has triggered outrage and efforts to remove the list and cancel its creator. Normally companies boast about the games that they were involved in, but at least one Sweet Baby employee, Chris Kindred, called the list “harassment” and tried to get it removed and the account that goes along with it too. The “sensitivity reader” concluded with an antisemitic slur about being worn down by “Zionists”.

Since Steam accounts contain digitally purchased games, that could mean a loss of thousands of dollars. Despite efforts to remove the list, it now has over 155,000 followers showing just how controversial Sweet Baby Inc has become and how many players are looking to avoid it.

And there’s evidence that gamers are avoiding anything rightly or even wrongly linked to Sweet Baby Inc. The company’s name, even when inaccurately linked to a title, depresses sales.

Sweet Baby Inc. has been connected with some of the highest profile game industry disasters in recent years. It consulted on Suicide Squad, which launched earlier this year as a massive failure with as much as $100 million in losses. Gotham Knights, also from Warner Bros, replaced Batman with a gay Robin and other woke characters, flopped almost as badly in 2022.

A woke reboot of the Saints Row franchise not only failed, but helped take the studio and possibly its larger company down with it. Some have linked Sweet Baby to the launch and failure of Starfield and a variety of other troubled games that suffered from wokeness issues.

The high-profile games on the official list of Sweet Baby Inc. products have mostly failed or underperformed suggesting that the company has become a kind of bad luck charm.

But some of the biggest companies in the industry aren’t abandoning Sweet Baby Inc or other similar groups like Black Girl Gamers, which consulted on the massive bomb, Forspoken, also estimated at $100 million in development costs, no matter how much money they lose.

Like most industry leaders, the big gaming firms are committed to DEI and ESG.

Companies like Microsoft, Warner Bros, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts and others value their high ESG scores which are supposed to attract woke investors and, more importantly, woke funds, including state government investors and union pension funds which put politics ahead of profits.

Those, and not the players who buy their games, are the real customers for the big gaming companies.