132
submitted 11 months ago by cheesorist@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

2 employees went to twitter to harass a steam group admin for listing the games Sweet Baby Inc. wrote for/were consulted with.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] SomeGuy69@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Because Sweet Baby Inc is known for forcing a narrative and tokens into the writing, for the sake of diversity on the cost of quality of the story and the characters. A lot of people don't like that.

Now the issue is much bigger than that and I don't like to involve myself with it much, as the controversy attracts a lot of truly bigot people, who also want to stop SBI. So one automatically gets shoved into that corner. And this is exactly what SBI is abusing to their advantage. No one can stop them from destroying good games in fear of getting burned on the stack.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 36 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I struggle to think of an otherwise good game they have "destroyed" by "forcing" a narrative or token characters.

That is to say, I don't think I can point to a case where the game would have been otherwise good. Adding badly written characters to bad games does make them if anything marginally better (at least they're consistent ๐Ÿ˜…), plus unless the devs completely lost control of their own project the consultation company would not actually implement the characters. They'd give you background stories, profiles, example interaction scenes where they took scenes and re-did them with their characters, or example lists of character archetypes to utilize this profile in.

The actual (bad) writing, (bad) characters and (bad) narrative are still up to the devs to (badly) add.

(edit)
I mean just going by their official project list, I can only personally mark out Suicide Squad, BattleShapers and Sable as bad, and none of these games needed their inclusionism - such as it is, you could argue Suicide Squad makes a mockery of it anyways - to be terrible games, they were plenty able of being that on their own. Plus again, it's the devs doing that, not the consulting company.

[-] cottonmon@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

One of the examples I've seen of SBI "forcing inclusivity" was making Saga in Alan Wake 2 black. I'm not familiar enough with SBI's work to do make a real judgement, but if this is one of the examples being used to say that SBI is making games worse, then the curator list is dumb.

[-] flumph@programming.dev 10 points 11 months ago

Because Sweet Baby Inc is known for forcing a narrative and tokens into the writing, for the sake of diversity on the cost of quality of the story and the characters.

Where is the proof of this beyond speculation? I can't think of a mechanism through which a consultant can force anything. Their contracts would undoubtedly have an NDA that would prevent them from sharing which of their recommendations the client acted on or not.

this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
132 points (100.0% liked)

Games

33957 readers
549 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS