Sweet Baby Inc. and the Steam Curator Group Conspiracy - The company that is responsible for the diarrheic video game writing.

[Skylavijas]

Newfag here and looking through the thread there are certain things that don't seem to add up for me. For one, the consultancy company only came to be in 2018, while I still clearly remember how years before the internet had gotten mental about folks like Anita Sarkeesian bringing wokeness into video games and succeeding in doing so. Is that consultancy company really the only and biggest force in making video games woke? I think there are many more stronger powers at play.

Secondly, I did notice claims that there are financial incentives which force companies to consult with the said consultancy.

https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1783237724847341675

View attachment 5934966

This is true, funding becomes easier if you kiss the ring. This is not even into question.

But looking at what types of companies are clients of Sweet Baby inc. (Ko_Op, Fellow Traveler, Metric Inc., etc.) majority of them are private companies, they do not have share holders, their funds come directly from their services so they are fully dedicating themselves in going woke to go broke. And the companies that are shareholder based (EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix) started switching full gear into churning out slop a whole decade ago before Sweet baby inc. would even become a thing.

Lastly (this is I guess unrelated to the thread) I do find it funny how some people are calling this gamergate 2.0 or some shit when me and a gaggle of other chronically online discord bros never heard of it becoming a big deal, except for me up until recently. Meanwhile, when the real gamergate happened, I was aware of trends and events it spawned even before I knew what gamergate was. I think people are forcing it to be a much bigger event than it actually is to score political good boy points on their respective side.

I think this whole controversy is just a an example of out of touch managers and devs hiring other out of touch consultants and people finally managing to find a toothless scarecrow they can beat up and vent their frustrations on without any risk of being bitten, not realizing that games will never be the same, games have not been the same for almost 2 decades now and there's fuck all we can do about it, besides enjoy watching shit going down in flames.

Feel free to correct on anything I've gotten wrong, as I don't have the dedication to look through 300+ pages on this thread, maybe there was indeed something major I was missing.

 

[ShitLurker]

Newfag here and looking through the thread there are certain things that don't seem to add up for me. For one, the consultancy company only came to be in 2018, while I still clearly remember how years before the internet had gotten mental about folks like Anita Sarkeesian bringing wokeness into video games and succeeding in doing so. Is that consultancy company really the only and biggest force in making video games woke? I think there are many more stronger powers at play.

Secondly, I did notice claims that there are financial incentives which force companies to consult with the said consultancy.

Welcome to the farms! Hope you enjoy it, don't be too much of a faggot if you can avoid it

On topic, though a lot of the youtube gritters have gotten a worse case of lockjaw than a pitbull with a baby and it comes to SBI. Realistically It's just the head of the Hydra that showed itself too much. This shit has been happening for longer and it's not just a single company (I'm aware of Black Girl Gamers and a few others have been mentioned in the thread) and Anita was already pushing her own grift and responsible of fucking up a few projects of her own. Basically, I imagine that there are dozens of more of these consulting companies, all financed by venture capital of some kind and due to the current year + 8 corporate culture you are pretty much forced to interact with one of them if you want to keep your ESG score up.

Or at least that was the pattern, with all of the supposed contraction happening with blackrock and other similar disruptive elements now that interest rates are up, who knows how things will proceed.

 

[SiccDicc]

But looking at what types of companies are clients of Sweet Baby inc. (Ko_Op, Fellow Traveler, Metric Inc., etc.) majority of them are private companies, they do not have share holders, their funds come directly from their services so they are fully dedicating themselves in going woke to go broke.

Banks offer favorable loans based on your ESG rating.

 

[NoReturn]

Newfag here and looking through the thread there are certain things that don't seem to add up for me. For one, the consultancy company only came to be in 2018, while I still clearly remember how years before the internet had gotten mental about folks like Anita Sarkeesian bringing wokeness into video games and succeeding in doing so. Is that consultancy company really the only and biggest force in making video games woke? I think there are many more stronger powers at play.

No, absolutely not. SBI is what caught people's attention because of the "SBI Detected" Steam group fiasco, but the greater picture involves the whole consulting "industry" (GaymerX is who worked with Pokémon Go, for example), a very insular turn in the games industry, and despite saying it's a conspiracy, collusion with gaming journalism.*

There's also the matter of non-sales funding. Look at Skull and Bones for example. The game was a total flop, but that's not what the company cared about. What mattered for the development of Skull and Bones was that the government of Singapore was giving Ubisoft money to develop in-country. So they had an "endless" supply of cash to keep developing until Singapore said "Hey you have to release something or pay us back all that tax money."

ESG money is similar. Raising funds to make a game can be hard, but there are investment companies out there who will give you money if you can guarantee that your game will include certain things (e.g. "diverse" characters) or if you take certain actions (e.g. hiring a consulting company).

If Blackrock says you can have $200 if you prove you hire a consulting agency like SBI, and the consulting agency only charges $100, then you have $100 bucks to fund your game now.

Spoiler: *

*Gamergate focuses on the games industry, but it's bigger even than that.

 

[Skylavijas]

No, absolutely not. SBI is what caught people's attention because of the "SBI Detected" Steam group fiasco, but the greater picture involves the whole consulting "industry" (GaymerX is who worked with Pokémon Go, for example), a very insular turn in the games industry, and despite saying it's a conspiracy, collusion with gaming journalism.*

There's also the matter of non-sales funding. Look at Skull and Bones for example. The game was a total flop, but that's not what the company cared about. What mattered for the development of Skull and Bones was that the government of Singapore was giving Ubisoft money to develop in-country. So they had an "endless" supply of cash to keep developing until Singapore said "Hey you have to release something or pay us back all that tax money."

ESG money is similar. Raising funds to make a game can be hard, but there are investment companies out there who will give you money if you can guarantee that your game will include certain things (e.g. "diverse" characters) or if you take certain actions (e.g. hiring a consulting company).

If Blackrock says you can have $200 if you prove you hire a consulting agency like SBI, and the consulting agency only charges $100, then you have $100 bucks to fund your game now.

Spoiler: *

*Gamergate focuses on the games industry, but it's bigger even than that.
View attachment 5940092
View attachment 5940096

Why is everything attributed to blackrock though? Again, many companies that work with SBI are *private* companies which can't pull the same shit like Ubisoft can and just use stock funds or foreign investments to pay for their asian bank holiday, while only using 10% of the said funds to make the actual game. If games flop for a private company they're shut down. If games flop for corporations like EA... they will shift the blame on some smaller company and sack it, worst case scenario... the CEO gets a beefy "retirement package", while all the workers they lay off get a "thank you for your service to our corporation" at best.

I'm inclined to believe Occam's razor in this situation and believe that greedy scummy human beings who probably never played a video game in their life are greedy scummy human beings that never played a video game in their life. Japan seems relatively much more capable in game development compared to western devs, because their business culture is almost polar opposite to the west's in some aspects. In Japan you're rewarded for corporate loyalty and severely punished for quitting or getting fired by being effectively blacklisted by every noteworthy company related to your field. That does mean that if shit hits the fan CEOs need to actually make personal sacrifices for everything to not go out of control, like how Nintendo's CEO Satoru Iwata halved his own salary in 2014 when WiiU happened. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/13/nin...ry-to-prevent-layoffs-why-thats-uncommon.html

You can see the effects of such cultural differences in both animation and comics as well, although I must say that it is incredibly unfair how in one culture you have talented people like Kentaro Miura literally working themselves to death while in another people are actively encouraged to be lazy and unimaginative. Both extremes are shitty in their own ways, but it is without a shadow of a doubt that Switch won this console war.

 

[marvlouslie]

Don't be a dumb consoomer. "We" don't "NEED" this game to succeed. Sony do.

Buying it does show this is what you want. By buying the game after what's happened, it shows that you want is censorship. Sony has now developed a pattern. That being to lie in trailers (they did it with Last of Us 2 as well).

So, all the defense of Shift Up and its game director was for fuck all then? Sounds like it.

 

[FedPostalService]

Why is everything attributed to blackrock though?

Because people are retards, don't understand business and/or finance, and just repeat what ever retards on the internet say.

 

[DumbDude43]

Again, many companies that work with SBI are *private* companies which can't pull the same shit like Ubisoft can and just use stock funds or foreign investments to pay for their asian bank holiday, while only using 10% of the said funds to make the actual game.

private companies can do all of that minus the stock shenanigans.
private companies can generally get away with a lot more questionable financial fuckery than public ones, because they do not have a duty to make their financials transparent like public corps do.

also private companies need credit and/or investment money just like public ones do, so they are subject to the same pressures and strings attached on this front.

 

[Glowie]

The trailer looks absolute dogshit. So much so I don't even feel like archiving it. Let it be lost to time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-BWx6mJQj8

Future people, imagine an ugly metroidvania. There, you've seen the trailer.
View attachment 5937044

All trailers lie "gameplay" ones are scripted and prerendered hot garbage on dev build meant to look good.

Working prototypes cost money to boot as such cinematic trailers are much cheaper and PR friendly

 

[NoReturn]

Why is everything attributed to blackrock though?

Like @FedPostalService said, it's memetic. Even I used it as an example because it's easily recognizable, and the company itself is brought up often because it's so damn big. Same for Vanguard. (If you ever want to see who owns the most shares of each company on the S&P 500, this site is a good reference.)

Again, many companies that work with SBI are *private* companies which can't pull the same shit like Ubisoft can and just use stock funds or foreign investments to pay for their asian bank holiday, while only using 10% of the said funds to make the actual game.

They can and they do, but the game is different. It's not the same as what the large companies do, of course, and failures are indeed more likely to get things shut down, but there are groups from which you can get funding. Even recently we had games like Goodbye Volcano High which were originally funded in part by private individuals. In all those cases, though, you still need to look at the funding.

If the person fronting the money for your game is trans, and they want trans characters in the game, you put trans characters in your game.

 

[Xenomorphs Are Cute]

I dont know if this has been posted but this is funny as fuck
https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/are-you-smarter-than-a-gamergater/
Its so retarded that if you select a single wrong answer it quits the quiz and tells you youre a gamergater. If you want to see all the questions and answers, you have to select the npc response every single time, no alternatives.

Edit: LMAO
View attachment 5939082
The use of the word normal triggered me a bit there cause there is no normal. Normal is a fascist term.

Here's the fail screen:

What's funny here is, it says "you are not smarter than a gamergater" which implies gamergate was smart & right.

Here's the answer sheet to "win" the quiz:

Considering theyre a bunch of trannies who raped children in a tranny porn studio.
View attachment 5939116View attachment 5939117
credits to @kenshirotism on twitter, I know he has an account here

I'm literally not surprised, also here's the OG tweet (Threadreader) by Andy Ngo in the 2nd pic. Here's the full case detail (Threadreader) of that pic.

The pictures which are absolute haram

Spoiler: You can literally see the AIDS in it

Archive

What's even funnier is, they made fun of game journalists themselves & dilated said urinalists due to it too.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Here's the answer sheet to "win" the quiz:

I struggle to find the words to express the utter disdain and contempt I have for those communists

 

[CrunkLord420]

Please understand that Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street are literally the 3 largest provider of funds in the world and saying that they "own" things is basically wrong. The most popular products is stuff like the S&P500 funds which effectively have zero subjective input from the fund managers, they just exist to rebalance the portfolio based on marketcap. These funds even provide proxy voting to fund holders.

Unless you can point to a specific actively managed fund then the conspiracy has no legs. ESG branded funds are actually quite unpopular in reality, and most of the time the actual ESG score requirements are so low that the whole system is kinda a joke.

Spoiler

SPLG has lowest management fees

 

[Judge Dredd]

Newfag here

Hi. Welcome.

Sorry in advance for the text wall, but you did ask.

Why is everything attributed to blackrock though?

Because people are retards, don't understand business and/or finance, and just repeat what ever retards on the internet say.

I know what you mean. When people used to mention Soros, I just tuned them out as they went down some conspiracy rabbit hole.

That said, there is at least something to it. Unfortunately, trying to explain it would make this post even longer. But the shortest of the short, they are a woke company that seems to have a stake in everything. There are others like that too.

As for private companies going woke for ESG. That's another rabbit hole called Private Equity. I'll link this 10 minute video if you care about the gist.

Newfag here and looking through the thread there are certain things that don't seem to add up for me. For one, the consultancy company only came to be in 2018, while I still clearly remember how years before the internet had gotten mental about folks like Anita Sarkeesian bringing wokeness into video games and succeeding in doing so. Is that consultancy company really the only and biggest force in making video games woke? I think there are many more stronger powers at play.

Consultancy companies have been a thing since at least 2012 when Anita Sarkeesian was going to EA to give opinions on Mirrors Edge.

They aren't the only reason. Entryism and the clique are a major cause as well, as is cancel culture. Again, to avoid a wall of autism, there's a bubble that formed within game development, mainly based in San Francisco, where journos and indie devs fuck each other for clout, money, and awards. That's what GamerGate was all about. Once in position, they set about freezing out anyone who isn't part of the clique. Those that they didn't like would be blacklisted, and at a time where getting coverage was the difference between an overnight success and languishing in obscurity, that allowed them a lot of control. It's why games like Kingdom Come, The Last Night, and Palworld make them so angry. They come from outside that SF bubble and didn't need to go through the usual channels (the clique or ESG) to succeed.

Lastly (this is I guess unrelated to the thread) I do find it funny how some people are calling this gamergate 2.0 or some shit when me and a gaggle of other chronically online discord bros never heard of it becoming a big deal, except for me up until recently. Meanwhile, when the real gamergate happened, I was aware of trends and events it spawned even before I knew what gamergate was. I think people are forcing it to be a much bigger event than it actually is to score political good boy points on their respective side.

Grifters going to grift. But one other reason is that mainstream media has been decimated since GamerGate. There won't be SBI Law and Order episode, no talks at the UN, games journos don't have that much clout any more, and many of the big names are too toxic to touch, but also too dangerous to fire, becoming a broken stair.

I think this whole controversy is just a an example of out of touch managers and devs hiring other out of touch consultants and people finally managing to find a toothless scarecrow they can beat up and vent their frustrations on without any risk of being bitten, not realizing that games will never be the same, games have not been the same for almost 2 decades now and there's fuck all we can do about it, besides enjoy watching shit going down in flames

And that is what you can do. All the ESG money is running out. It's not a sustainable system. I've repeated this too often in this thread, but the crash is already here. Mass layoffs and studios shutting down is not a good sign for AAA. We know that Hollywood is basically in survival mode, and we're seeing these woke devs being smug on Twitter one minute, then screaming at clouds because they're losing their jobs and people like the SBI Detected Steam group are not buying their games.

 

[CrunkLord420]

You can easily search stock exposure in ETFs on like a hundred websites. The entire top list (by market value) is just a bunch of passively managed index funds. Some $1M AUM actively managed ESG fund is basically nothing compared to GAW's £3.21B marketcap. No one cares about GAW, SAD!

https://www.tipranks.com/stocks/gb:gaw/etf-exposure

 

[DumbDude43]

I know what you mean. When people used to mention Soros, I just tuned them out as they went down some conspiracy rabbit hole.

the soros conspiracy stuff often goes way over the top (especially when they go off on adrenochrome or how he's a secret nazi) but the core is pretty solid
if you take a look at the activities of the open society foundations in various countries, they actively promote and support pretty much everything that people commonly blame on soros - from mass migration to lgbt shit, it's all there and out on the open

 

[CrunkLord420]

George Soros and Larry Fink are both globohomos. Basically every NGO is existence is also globohomo. Everyone is ideologically compromised by it because they allow themselves to be, and many genuinely believe in it. As Moldbug puts it, it is synoptic.

 

[Skylavijas]

Damn, I genuinely didn't expect to learn about economics when coming to this thread. You people are running a quality thread, it needs to get bumped more.

And yeah, after seeing something like Wille Coyote vs Acme movie getting shelved for no apparent reason at all it is becoming clear that something's seriously not right with the US entertainment industry in general. It seems to extend even to Europe, but at least some European countries have clapped down hard on lootboxes and EU has on planned obsolescence of apple products. And the continent has shown to be fully capable of producing decent games, even if they're forced to work with smaller budgets due to a lack of investors. I mean, the term 'Eurojank' exists for a reason. Maybe that's what the future for american gaming holds, that the industry will end up devolving to making janky, smaller, but more engaging video games... oh fuck, that's just Bethesda 15-20 years ago.

 

[Back me up!]

Damn, I genuinely didn't expect to learn about economics when coming to this thread. You people are running a quality thread, it needs to get bumped more.

And yeah, after seeing something like Wille Coyote vs Acme movie getting shelved for no apparent reason at all it is becoming clear that something's seriously not right with the US entertainment industry in general. It seems to extend even to Europe, but at least some European countries have clapped down hard on lootboxes and EU has on planned obsolescence of apple products. And the continent has shown to be fully capable of producing decent games, even if they're forced to work with smaller budgets due to a lack of investors. I mean, the term 'Eurojank' exists for a reason. Maybe that's what the future for american gaming holds, that the industry will end up devolving to making janky, smaller, but more engaging video games... oh fuck, that's just Bethesda 15-20 years ago.

The US Gaming Market is already like that. Palworld/Helldivers 2 was made by small teams that were basically given no oversight and became smash hits. Manor Lords just released into EA and has sold something like 10,000 copies and it was all made by one dude. Except to see more and more of these type of teams coming back as AAA keeps being a burning trashfire. What I'm excited for is small teams leverage AI tools and software to help speed up development process/shore up areas they are collective weak in to allow a higher quality of game to be made with less manpower/cost.

 

[X Prime]

People are making too much hay about BlackRock etc.

The issue here is, as always, the colleges. It's cool to be liberal, pro-LGBTQMAP+, etc. You are therefore rewarded for following these orthodoxies. It's that simple. Basic reinforcement.

If there was a reward structure set up for being Super Straight, LGBTQ+ crap would be relegated to the closet where it belongs within two generations.