Not So Sweet Cry Baby

All Chris Kindred had to do was not say anything. It was just that simple. Somebody, somewhere, didn’t like the work that she did, and that her company did on various game stories in the past few years. Big deal, it happens to everyone who works in games for more than a few months. Having haters comes with the territory of being an even remotely public figure in the age of the internet. Not punching down and responding to trolls living in their mother’s basement is something that most healthy, normal people figure out.

But Chris Kindred couldn’t do that. So on Leap Day, February 29th, 2024, she decided that some random Brazilian dude maintaining a curated Steam list of games that Chris Kindred’s company had been involved with, that random dude needed to be destroyed. He needed to have his curated Steam group crushed, and he needed to have his Steam account banned.

Now a bit of context for those who don’t marinate in the world of PC Gaming. Steam is to digital PC game sales what Amazon is to just about everything else. There are several other online storefronts (GOG.com and Epic Games being the other two largest), but Steam is by far the 900lb gorilla in the room. When Valve launched Steam, they were the first to have an online store. It’s the model that everyone else has followed.

For gamers who have been on Steam for a long time (and some of us have been on Steam for nineteen years at this point) our Steam accounts may hold thousands of games. Those games represent tens of thousands of dollars worth of games, cards, and in-game items, not to mention badges earned, screenshots created, etc. In short, for a long time PC gamer, losing one’s Steam account is a huge deal.

The other thing with Steam is that a huge number of games get released on there every week. There’s no way to keep track of them all, which is where curators and groups come in. Curators keep lists of games that match whatever their personal interests are. Like anime-inspired 2D sidescrolling Metroidvania clones? There’s a list for that. Alternative history roguelikes more your style? There’s probably a list for that too. As such, it should come as no surprise that at least one curator would notice that a specific narrative company had worked on a lot of story-heavy games which were critical darlings, but which were less impressively received by fans.

And so, with the stage set, we return now to our narrative…

The thing is, until Chris Kindred decided to punch way, way down, most people had never heard of Sweet Baby, Inc. Most actual gamers, regardless of their specific political stripes, don’t appreciate a bully, and the initial backlash on X and Steam was rapid. But when your job is grifting from development budgets in the name of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, you can always count on having friends in the media. And thus the tame, predictable little lapdogs at Kotaku, PC Gamer, (archive.org links there, because I’m not giving those assholes actual clicks) and others jumped to Sweet Baby Inc.’s defense by publishing stories about the “controversy” while conveniently leaving out the fact that the entire controversy was blown up by one thin skinned, whiny employee.

Now my personal opinion is that story consultant companies like Sweet Baby Inc. are about as useful to actual game development as sensitivity readers are to writers, shin splints are to runners, or diesel fuel is to gas powered cars. In short, useless if not actively harmful.

Looking over Wikipedia’s list of games that Sweet Baby Inc. has “contributed” to, I’ve only played one of them. Why The Crew: Motorfest needed “additional writing” I can’t imagine. In a racing game set in Hawaii where the story is a paint by numbers show up, drive cool cards, and do outlandish stunts, the contributions of a diversity consulting team seem like an utter waste of money. But hey, that’s basically their whole gig (and the same grift that sensitivity writers do) show up, impede actual developers trying to get shit done, make a few useless suggestions “You should race swap character X” or whatever, get paid, and leave. Move to the next company, wash, rinse, repeat. Keep the grift going because every major studio is run by terrified execs afraid of waking up to find their names at the top of an IGN story for being insufficiently diverse because they didn’t go along with the grift.

At this point, the “controversy” has been sort of picked up by a few legacy media outlets too, although they’re continuing to run with the totally disingenuous “Gamergate 2.0” narrative of “Those darn gamers just hate diversity!” as though this whole thing wasn’t kicked off by a cowardly, vindictive little bitch who can’t stand criticism.

Ironically, despite the fact that I’ve never had a single interaction with her, Chris Kindred has me blocked on X. Presumably that’s because she’s using a blocklist and I follow some “wrongthinking” people. Personally, I’d hope that this exposure ends the grift of Sweet Baby Inc., and that the money development studios are wasting on diversity consultants starts going to something more useful like, oh, I don’t know, hiring a few more full time employees or stocking better snacks, but that’s probably too much to ask.

All I really know is that I’ve been out of the game for a while, I’m not planning to get back into the game anytime soon, and that there weren’t any diversity consultants contributing to the ‘90s classics that I’ve been posting to YouTube. (Yes, that’s a shameless plug, no, I’m not sorry.)