Blows in from stupid town.
MMO Fallout has been around for nearly fifteen years and I’m proud to say I’ve never become anything close to an internet celebrity. The best I can say is that a number of industry people read this website, I get my share of traffic, and I’ve even been name dropped by coworkers who had absolutely no idea they were talking about me to myself. Hi friends.
So I’m pretty good at avoiding controversy, mostly by not saying anything particularly controversial even in today’s ‘everything is controversial including silence’ environment. And I’d like to weigh in on a recent thing that happened on Steam and on Twitter because it goes to one of my core tenants of not causing controversy; the fact that shutting the hell up is always an option.
The whole story revolves around this company called Sweet Baby Inc., and if this name means nothing to you than by the power of Grayskull I implore you to at least skip the next couple of paragraphs to keep that angelic mind of yours untainted by more dumb internet crap. At the very least skip to the Sweet Baby Inc. Detected screenshot below to get to the point of this story.
For those interested, keep reading. You know this article is about someone shooting themselves in the foot because I used the traditional dog eating its own leg as the header.
Sweet Baby Inc. is a company is a company that formed in Montreal in 2018 and to the shock of absolutely nobody a business formed out of Quebec has set a hostile tone with…well, pretty much everybody outside of Quebec. They only really gained internet notoriety in the last few months though.
The company is a consulting firm focused on developing more empathetic and diverse media. They also do sensitivity reading and risk assessment. The problem is nobody knows quite what that means, or the extent to which a company like Sweet Baby actually has on development studios and the finished product.
Sweet Baby Inc. has been involved with games like Alan Wake II and Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, the latter of which I played and actually enjoyed despite its list of issues.
Any who, the Steam curator page you see above is at just under 95,000 followers at the time that I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon. Roll back the clock a couple of weeks and I don’t think they had more than 2k people following.
All because Sweet Baby Inc. has some stupid employees.
This Steam curator was set up to curate games that Sweet Baby Inc. was involved in and was operating in relative obscurity, and that drew the ire of at least one employee from? Sweet Baby Inc. Narrative designer Chris Kindred took to Twitter to target not just the group, but the guy running it. Kindred encouraged their followers to report the group and the creator’s Steam account with the obvious goal being having both banned from Steam.
If there’s a textbook definition of targeted harassment, this is it. Just as a side note, a quick session with MMO Fallout Consultancy would’ve told you that strategy wouldn’t have worked.
Chris is now in Twitter witness protection with a protected account, but the damage is done. The curator group is still alive and well, and if you haven’t noticed in the few days since Chris tried to target it their numbers have ballooned to over 94 thousand people. You literally couldn’t have asked for a better publicity campaign without having to pay top dollar for it.
This is probably the most damning reason to not hire Sweet Baby Inc., and I say that as in let’s ignore the political stuff and just focus on the fact that a person who is the “narrative designer” couldn’t construct a simple narrative that didn’t blow up in their face and achieve monumentally the opposite effect from what was intended. It’s incompetence bordering on consultancy malpractice.
It reminded me of that famous episode of Father Ted where the church forces Ted and Dougal to protest a movie (The Passion of Saint Tibulus)
the church doesn’t approve of. The resulting controversy causes the film to be so successful that people are showing up from all over Europe to watch it. While Bishop Brennan blames Ted’s incompetence for the result, the reality is that the church taking a stance on the film at all did more to bring attention to it than if they had not acknowledged it at all and left it playing on a single theater in a tiny island nobody heard off off the coast of Ireland.
And that’s basically this curator group, which didn’t get popular until Sweet Baby Inc. told people not to use it.
You’ll notice I’m being very narrow in the scope of this discussion, and yes it’s intentional. I’m not going to go into the people involved or their histories or the things they’ve posted on Twitter before. None of that is germane to this particular discussion and I’m sure much of my audience doesn’t care anyway.
Now if you want a place to further diversity that focuses on positivity, I recommend MMO Fallout’s friends at the Game Devs of Color Expo. 2024 showcase now accepting applications.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
MMO Fallout 