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

[Ser Prize]

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

Then what's the secret? Like seriously, if not EGS what spontaneously caused the gaming industry at large to start being incredibly, obnoxiously woke?

 

[Back me up!]

Then what's the secret? Like seriously, if not EGS what spontaneously caused the gaming industry at large to start being incredibly, obnoxiously woke?

Its became popular.

So when gaming was for the nerds only white/asian dudes wanted to be in. Then it started to make money (LOTS of money) and became popular. So now we have larger companies getting into the action and larger companies mean HR/deadweight/etc. It also became "cool" to be a game developer in the indie scene with new tools coming out making it easier and easier to crap out something that could be called a game. Every one was rushing to be the next Super Meat Boy/Braid etc. So it attracted the losers, the hanger on, the freaks, and the politically dedicated. They couldn't actually create but they could "help out" in other ways (even if it was finally touching some lonely nerd cock) and moved their way up the ranks in position that had power but were not actually about creating games. Nerds had no defense against it cause of the Five Geek Social Fallacies and really just wanted to create games so the allure of some one else handling all the other bullshit (non-creation) stuff seem appealing.

So it has all come to a head in the last 10 years. Hopefully the AAA crashes and we go back to what truly made gaming great:

One to twelve nerds in a basement/house some where coding games in-between playing D&D/Warhammer.

 

[dustbuster]

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

They control plurality proxy votes on pretty much everyone, and use those votes to force excess costs and massive losses on companies through efforts that make things more expensive and less desirable for their customers. (this is arguably a violation of fiduciary duty laws, and a multi-state coalition is slowly ramping up pressure and opening investigations, but the real muscle as at the federal level, and Biden's insane asylum of woke activists is NOT going to enforce that law)

Unless you can point to a specific actively managed fund then the conspiracy has no legs.

Here's a well-cited post on the twatter about how blackrock in particular operate, using the example of why texas has chosen to boycott and divest from Blackrock over how they operate in fossil fuels and how they're pushing ESG.

https://nitter.poast.org/ColeMacro/status/1770963868384178513#m

(context: this tweet was in reply to a blackrock public statement attempting to cast Texas as liars)
Yes, Blackrock has hundreds of billions in energy assets, but that does not mean Blackrock has been a good steward with those assets and *that* is the problem. These assets have been used to push a climate agenda on corporations against their will in a manner that imposes *long term* costs on both corporations and investors. Let's look at the facts:

Fact #1: Blackrock has actively engaged with publicly traded energy companies *pushing* a climate agenda on them against their will.

Example 1: In 2021, there was a shareholder proposal at Chevron that would require the company to reduce its Scope 3 emissions. Chevron recommended that investors vote against the proposal, yet Blackrock used its billions of dollars of holdings to vote *for* the proposal anyways stating "because it is consistent with what we expect of large companies like Chevron and its peers."

Chevron recommends *against* proposal (page 88 ): chevron.com/-/media/shared-m…
Blackrock votes *for* proposal (page 2): blackrock.com/corporate/lite…

Example 2: In 2021, a Climate activist investor, Engine No. 1 put up a slate of climate activists to the board of Exxon. Exxon recommended shareholders vote against all of the dissident directors, yet Blackrock voted *for* three of them. With your support, they got elected.
You stated: “We believe more needs to be done in Exxon’s long-term strategy” on reducing climate risk, which threatens shareholder value."

Exxon recommends *against* Engine No. 1 board slate (page 1): d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net…
Blackrock votes *for* three Engine No. 1 candidates: blackrock.com/corporate/lite…

These aren't the only examples...

Fact #2: Blackrock was behind the SEC’s new *mandatory* ESG climate disclosures that will *cost* publicly traded corporations billions of dollars.

On March 6th 2024, the SEC passed a mandatory ESG climate disclosure rule that was voted on political party lines. In 2021, Blackrock sent the SEC a public letter *requesting* the SEC implement mandatory climate-related disclosures (Blackrock's letter to the SEC: sec.gov/comments/climate-dis…).

The final rule drafted by the SEC explicitly mentions Blackrock 55 times. The only asset managers referenced more frequently were politicized public pensions like CalPERS and CalSTRS. (sec.gov/files/rules/final/20…).

As Bernard Sharfman called out, this rule will *cost* public corporations billions of dollars. “PricewaterhouseCoopers PwC is planning on hiring 100,000 new employees and investing $12 billion over the next five years to help meet its clients’ ESG reporting requirements. We can assume that this represents only the tip of the iceberg and probably does not even represent what public companies will actually pay to have the compliance work done.”

Fact #3: Blackrock is a member of multiple climate groups, including the Net Zero Asset Managers and publicly admits it will force its climate view on energy companies if they don’t comply.

Blackrock states: “BlackRock developed and implemented a “Heightened Scrutiny Framework” to track, analyse, and manage active positions in issuers that are significantly exposed to climate risk due to: a) high carbon emissions today, b) insufficient preparation for the net zero transition, and c) low reception to our investment stewardship engagement. Where we do not see enough progress for these issuers, and in particular where we see a lack of alignment combined with a lack of engagement, we may not support management in our voting for the holdings our clients have in index portfolios, and we will also flag these holdings for targeted review and engagement in our discretionary active portfolios where we believe they may present a risk to performance. netzeroassetmanagers.org/sig…

Conclusion: The action by the Texas Permanent School Fund was warranted.

Whatever a company does, blackrock will seek to borg it and have it push leftoid bullshit in whatever sector it's in.
If it's energy, you suddenly have oil companies refusing to drill for oil, no matter how badly it hurts them, their customers, and the public.
If it's media, you suddenly have companies pushing ass-ugly trans black cripples and vilifying heterosexuality.

"you have to force behaviors" - Larry Fink

 

[Baraka Obama]

Its became popular.

So when gaming was for the nerds only white/asian dudes wanted to be in. Then it started to make money (LOTS of money) and became popular. So now we have larger companies getting into the action and larger companies mean HR/deadweight/etc. It also became "cool" to be a game developer in the indie scene with new tools coming out making it easier and easier to crap out something that could be called a game. Every one was rushing to be the next Super Meat Boy/Braid etc. So it attracted the losers, the hanger on, the freaks, and the politically dedicated. They couldn't actually create but they could "help out" in other ways (even if it was finally touching some lonely nerd cock) and moved their way up the ranks in position that had power but were not actually about creating games. Nerds had no defense against it cause of the Five Geek Social Fallacies and really just wanted to create games so the allure of some one else handling all the other bullshit (non-creation) stuff seem appealing.

So it has all come to a head in the last 10 years. Hopefully the AAA crashes and we go back to what truly made gaming great:

View attachment 5954626

One to twelve nerds in a basement/house some where coding games in-between playing D&D/Warhammer.

It became popular but also in the past decade hard-left weirdos have managed to ruin everything good and fun that has the slightest bit of popularity. The two coinciding has been a disaster. I know a bunch of people who now feel like they just dont like games at all after playing the "highly recommended, top-tier" Sony junk and not having a bit of fun.

 

[dustbuster]

Its became popular.

"Popular" my ass.

See my post above regarding blackrock.
Also, look up the embedding of ESG into lending:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/big_banks_setting_actual_loan_rates_to_big_businesses_based_on_diversity_quotas_instead_of_ability_to_repay.html

https://www.wilmingtontrust.com/library/article/the-rise-of-esg-lending-trends-and-considerations

It's all Top Down.
These are Fink and peers, who got their head starts gaining this market power via grants from the Obama administration to "rescue" companies.

In terms of ACTUAL diversity in video games, the Krogan were the pinnacle of that.
I want more Krogan representation.
Krogan Lives Matter!

 

[Back me up!]

"Popular" my ass.

See my post above regarding blackrock.
Also, look up the embedding of ESG into lending:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/big_banks_setting_actual_loan_rates_to_big_businesses_based_on_diversity_quotas_instead_of_ability_to_repay.html

https://www.wilmingtontrust.com/library/article/the-rise-of-esg-lending-trends-and-considerations

Popular as referring to gaming, not ESG

Like I don't know how old you are but between the 80s to the around the early 2000 Xbox era gaming was just for dorky outcast and children. Once it became apparent that video games were making more money then the movie industry of course Blackrock is gonna notice and try to get their hands into it. If gaming had stay niche Blackrock wouldn't have cared (or at least not as much).

 

[Judge Dredd]

I know a bunch of people who now feel like they just dont like games at all after playing the "highly recommended, top-tier" Sony junk and not having a bit of fun.

I see the same with old gamers who assume they're the problem for being too nostalgic or cynical, or kids complaining that older people need to just get with the times because games have "always" been gotcha and GaaS crap filled with wokeshit.

If gaming had stay niche Blackrock wouldn't have cared (or at least not as much).

It hasn't stopped them doing it to sci-fi novels and minitures wargaming. Although I don't know if it was Blackrock in that case.

 

[Back me up!]

I see the same with old gamers who assume they're the problem for being too nostalgic or cynical, or kids complaining that older people need to just get with the times because games have "always" been gotcha and GaaS crap filled with wokeshit.


It hasn't stopped them doing it to sci-fi novels and minitures wargaming. Although I don't know if it was Blackrock in that case.

Because Warhammer 40k got popular (as another place to mine ideas since no one can actually make anything new now). Once Harvy Carvill was all in on making a 40K live action series the push started to happening. Up until then Game Workspace did a decent job staying out of it and even when they added stuff wokeish stuff it kind of back fired (The universe is the way it is because of a "women movement").

 

[Tanner Glass]

Didn’t they change the ending of Super Hot because of troons crying about the depiction of suicide?

Superhot VR, but yes.

Superhot VR had a first-person suicide (in line with Superhot's ending where you take control of a different enemy and shoot your own body) that caused quite an uproar.

Then what's the secret? Like seriously, if not EGS what spontaneously caused the gaming industry at large to start being incredibly, obnoxiously woke?

The real secret is brain drain. When video game exploded - it made a bunch of people a lot of money. You had the small teams (aka 12 nerds in a basement) being scaled up to huge sizes - with your Todd Howards, John Carmacks, Robin Walkers, etc being given senior executive titles, piles of cash (tens of millions or more), company shares, and huge teams consisting of hundreds of devs with the freedom to work on huge projects - several at a time.

This worked for a while and resulted in some huge games being made (3d fallout, Gears of War, modern Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo 2/LOD, Starcraft/BW, and so on) - but then the cracks started showing. Money was extremely good - but it could always be better and shareholders/beancounters started chasing trends instead of trying to make great games. Microtransactions, chasing trends (Card games! Arena Shooters! MOBAs! RogueLikes! 4-Person CoOp!).

This led to a lot of unhappy developers on all levels. The high level guys have "fuck you" money and didn't want to chase trends but the lower level guys started figuring out that they're never moving up in the various companies they are in. You aren't going to be the "next Todd Howard" because Todd Howard is still Todd Howard (and then it would be Angela B, then Pete Hines, then like 20 other people). This created a huge rift in the games space - you have these huge AAA projects that need talented devs, but you are starting to have a shortage of devs to fill the role as the job - but it carried on like this for a short while as those jobs paid (decently) and there wasn't a path forward.

Then it happened - the absolute reckoning for AAA games and the birth of a new icon - Minecraft was purchased for $2.5 billion dollars and showed that indie games can not only succeed - but succeed unbelievably. Minecraft was the biggest - but Stardew Valley, Undertale, and Five Nights at Freddy's all went on to be beloved and make their creators untold piles of money and fame - way more than any "regular ass" developer was going to ever see in his life.

AAA devs already had a recruiting problem but this was now hundreds of times worse - your pool of employees that would become your future Game Director/Studio Director/whatever has just drastically shrunk and your existing employees are jumping ship for better opportunities (aka Jeff Kaplan of WoW/OW, Jade Raymond from Ubisoft, Morihime from Blizzard, Kojima from Konami, etc) - and you're feeling the walls closing in. You see this most directly with Blizzard - with how bad the game direction is on what would otherwise be flagpole titles (Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, WoW, Overwatch, and Diablo 4) but in other comical misfires too (aka Ubisoft's Anthem, or Arkane's Redfall).

So they've built this huge AAA apparatus but can't really find anyone to run it. The people that can run it don't want to and the people that want to run it simply aren't capable of it. There's no way shareholders are going to accept anything other than complete non-stop success so you can't stop and reinvest in your company long-term, what can you really do? The writing is 100% on the wall - AAA is struggling massively and A, AA, and Indie are all finding massive success (Helldivers 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Stellar Blade, Palworld, HiFi Rush, Sea of Stars).

Enter the consultants. SBI is just the newest version of this - but consulting is where these large studios have turned to try and fill the vacuum they've created. They say all the right things, have the right credentials, so maybe it'll work and keep everyone happy? (Fact - it will not). But it's enough to buy some time and if it doesn't work out - you can just blame them and try a new group after.

Sweet Baby Inc are just the vultures eating the corpse of AAA gaming - but this has been a very long time coming as the AAA studios have just been getting more and more unreasonable as the years went by. The real solution for AAA is to scale back, rebuild, re-evaluate the market (aka do we need a new Call of Duty every year if we have to pay 4 fucking studios to do it), and find a better way to pay key developers and develop newer ideas - but until that happens we're going to be locked into this AAA death spiral.

 

[dustbuster]

but this has been a very long time coming as the AAA studios have just been getting more and more unreasonable as the years went by. The real solution for AAA is to scale back, rebuild, re-evaluate the market (aka do we need a new Call of Duty every year if we have to pay 4 fucking studios to do it), and find a better way to pay key developers and develop newer ideas

They can't do that.
Their companies are "public" and subject to shareholder restraints.
There need to be major overhauls of the concept of fiduciary duty to include reinvestments for long-term viability and the allowance for the structure of the market, specifically the customer niche being served.

The best companies serve specific customers' niche needs well, but that doesn't allow infinite growth, which is bad because "line no go up".
That needs fixing.

The problem with attempting those overhauls is you will have marxists attempting to insert "ESG" into those reforms to allow wokes even more latitude to make things shit.
You'd have to gunt-guard the legislation like nothing else.

This is why modern public company systems turn everything into gulag-tier "balanda"

 

[Tanner Glass]

They can't do that.
Their companies are "public" and subject to shareholder restraints.
There need to be major overhauls of the concept of fiduciary duty to include reinvestments for long-term viability and the allowance for the structure of the market, specifically the customer niche being served.

The best companies serve specific customers' niche needs well, but that doesn't allow infinite growth, which is bad because "line no go up".
That needs fixing.

The problem with attempting those overhauls is you will have marxists attempting to insert "ESG" into those reforms to allow wokes even more latitude to make things shit.
You'd have to gunt-guard the legislation like nothing else.

This is why modern public company systems turn everything into gulag-tier "balanda"

Well, they're actually doing it - just not the way they think they are.

These large AAA studios are dying - but the amount of success is going to transform all of the A, AA, and indie studios into the next "evolution" of Game Dev until one of them has a grand idea that requires a large investment of hiring/size/scope/scale whatever. You're already seeing it a little bit with Larian Studios (the BG3 studio) - they are working on a new large scale project but they have the headcount of a full AAA studio despite being "indie" branded.

Some larger scale project is going to become successful (I'd guess a game with the same amazing scale/impact as World of Warcraft but with 2025 tech instead of 2004 tech) and the new "meta" is going to be exploring that space - going back to "12 nerds in a room" being picked up and turned into large scale game studios again. Then those companies will be the new AAA studios until they reach this point - die, leaving seeds for A, AA, and indie studios again - and so on and so on.

It's almost cyclical in nature.

 

[Judge Dredd]

This created a huge rift in the games space - you have these huge AAA projects that need talented devs, but you are starting to have a shortage of devs to fill the role as the job - but it carried on like this for a short while as those jobs paid (decently) and there wasn't a path forward.

I agree with your post, but disagree here.

For a long time AAA has treated it's employees like shit because it's a "dream job" to work at Activision, EA, etc. So they crunch them endlessly, until they either burn out and leave (to be replaced by another desperate wannabe) or until the game ships, at which point they do a mass layoff to cut costs.

 

[Tanner Glass]

I agree with your post, but disagree here.

For a long time AAA has treated it's employees like shit because it's a "dream job" to work at Activision, EA, etc. So they crunch them endlessly, until they either burn out and leave (to be replaced by another desperate wannabe) or until the game ships, at which point they do a mass layoff to cut costs.

I don't disagree with you.

The key word is "talented" - you can find 200 "game developers" pretty easy because of it's "dream job" status - but very likely none of those devs are going to grow your company in a real way. You see this highlighted with Blizzard - with the single biggest "step forward" associated with their company in the last 15 years was DOTA, which was a free map made by non-employees. Blizzard shit the bed so hard that Valve was able to swoop it up by just not being pieces of shit to the current dev team. They didn't want to give Icefrog and friends any money, Icefrog and friends weren't employees and now Icefrog and friends made Valve (one of Blizzard's competitors) nearly a billion fucking dollars.

Everyone made fun of Jade Raymond when Ubisoft had her front and center but the Assassin's creed franchise fell off a fucking cliff when she left. Everyone shits on Todd Howard until they see what Fallout looks like when Obsidian is "finally free to make a Fallout inspired game" - it was Outer Worlds and it was absolute dogshit. Everyone thought Blizzard was as bad as it was going to get (Overwatch 1 stagnating and WoW : Legion) until Morhaime and Kaplan hit the door and you get WoW : Battle for Azeroth and Overwatch 2. And so on.

Game Devs are plentiful - talented Game devs are not. Hiring 200 non-talented game devs is how you get shit like "*murrs softly in your ear*" in World of Warcraft. It's why the game has no innovation, no focus, no direction, and no positive trajectory. You can fill diversity quotas all day - but you need several strong team members at several key areas. You need to identify them, retain them, train them, make them happy, and let them develop projects. This is a lesson that AAA teams are learning hard because they really thought studios were so interchangable they had Bioware make Anthem and Arkane make Redfall.

These companies are going to live and die on their ability to attract visionaries to their banners.

 

[Outer Space Traveller]

Few years ago he blatantly shilled for a Chinese mmo and when people called him out on it he had a meltdown called everyone xenophobic lmao (also he's Jewish)

Every. Single. Time. That explains his behaviour.

(...)
I would've through that martial arts were the opposite of progressivism. Part of fighting is learning self control and discipline. It also comes naturally as your ability improves. It seems strange that people into martial arts would become emotional and fly off the handle like that, or worse, challenge people to fight them in real life discord. That's basically anathema to the concept.

Precisely my point of view. Martial arts would make someone view things more seriously and not be a pansy. I guess no area is safe: Warhammer, games that are tough, Motorcycles, and tough sports, Dangerous stunts, Firearms, Religion, and so forth.

All in all, this is a coordinated effort from Top-Down, I feel.

 

[marvlouslie]

Going forward, I'm just going to assume every AAA game that's released is infused with DEI and has worked with a company similar to (if not directly affiliated with) Sweet Baby Inc. unless proven otherwise. Games from the big three, I'm just going to ignore. Besides. I've had more fun discovering Indies. They at least seem to care about the quality of a lot of their work. PC Master Race ftw.

 

[ZMOT]

Well they are fucked then. What compels someone to put it solely on EGS?
Epic has done nothing to improve the store or its image to the general populace.
If you speak to any random gamer about EGS 90% of them are going to hate on it.

publishing always worked that way, usually wasn't an issue because you either have a console exclusive or later a port.
only timmy the epic tard thought it was a good idea to bring that shit onto the PC platform to push the shit store instead competing with quality and features.

Going forward, I'm just going to assume every AAA game that's released is infused with DEI and has worked with a company similar to (if not directly affiliated with) Sweet Baby Inc. unless proven otherwise. Games from the big three, I'm just going to ignore. Besides. I've had more fun discovering Indies. They at least seem to care about the quality of a lot of their work. PC Master Race ftw.

that's how I've been handing it for 5+ years lol

 

[Herman J Throwaway]

Iillitirate

The irony...

 

[CrunkLord420]

Then what's the secret? Like seriously, if not EGS what spontaneously caused the gaming industry at large to start being incredibly, obnoxiously woke?

There is no secret. The majority of people in the gaming industry are westerners who went to university and became just globohomos as a result. They genuinely support this. The rest are simply complicit because they make no efforts to resist. I'm tired of people blaming the man behind the curtain. Actually it's your fault, it's your employers fault, it's your neighbors fault. Everyone just laid down and accepted this bullshit for at least a decade.

They control plurality proxy votes on pretty much everyone, and use those votes to force excess costs and massive losses on companies through efforts that make things more expensive and less desirable for their customers. (this is arguably a violation of fiduciary duty laws, and a multi-state coalition is slowly ramping up pressure and opening investigations, but the real muscle as at the federal level, and Biden's insane asylum of woke activists is NOT going to enforce that law)

I get to vote, which is usually just whatever the board recommends. It's almost always very uninteresting. Further to that you can even add yourself to a automated voting blocks which literally include Catholic-faith based voting right along side with ESG. Regardless, micromanagement like the recent WH40k thing is totally outside of these high level decisions. That decisions was 100% made internally to WH40k. There was even that specific writer who is a giant globohomo making tranny space marines and LITERALLY MADE A FICTIONAL VILLAIN BASED OFF OF SARGON.

 

[dustbuster]

micromanagement like the recent WH40k thing is totally outside of these high level decisions. That decisions was 100% made internally to WH40k.

Of course, but at the end of the day the officers doing the micromanagement can trace their employment and empowerment ultimately to people like Larry Fink hijacking the retirement funds of people who fundamentally disagree with what's being done to force it down our throats.

Making proxy voting illegal would end "woke corporate" within a decade. It would heal on its own.

 

[Colon capital V]

Anti-Woke + Fat Deboonker YouTube channel, Think Before You Sleep, released an hour long video going over the SBI controversy: