I follow gaming news pretty closely and I've never even heard of this one. Wouldn't be surprised if the low engagement, at least in part, comes down to poor marketing.
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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Same here, and frankly, what kind of title is “Unknown 9: Awakening” supposed to be? That reads like an internal Codename they forgot to change pre-release:
Anyone that employs Sweet Baby deserves to fail. Good thing people are waking up to that.
I would be careful with such generalizations - not because I'd be downvoted into a hole (I've turned the scores off and just DGAF), but it's epistemologically a bad habit. However, whatever I've seen so far that SBI had their fingers in does have a certain fellow-kids, safe-edgy, corporate-approved, plushie-anarchist tone, the dialogues are atrociously bad and disjointed from their theme (Sable's postapocalypse, for instance). They can do a less funny version of Joss Whedon's relaxed banter and they tend to stick it everywhere. But what I really dislike about SBI is that it's obviously a grift, making developers cough protection money to add pronouns and hair colors to characters.
Besides the actual quality of the game, it seems like (stupid) people are complaining about DEI in this game? Why?
People are the worst.
From what I know Sweet Baby Inc. is involved. Which is a studio that focuses a lot on DEI when it comes to narratives/story in games.
They already did not have the greatest track record, some good games, but a lot of mediocre and even bad games. It doesn't necessarily mean that the game scores are related to DEI, but the fact it keeps happening to games they're involved with says at least something.
What does “focuses on DEI” even mean? That it has non-white people?
Some stories don’t have straight, white people. That doesn’t mean there’s some agenda going on.
It means exactly what DEI is. So yeah, predominantly focusing on non-white people and non-straight people.
They are a studio that consults on specifically this in games they're collaborating with.
They are contract writers for hire, and you have been misled, either intentionally or unintentionally, by the YouTubers you follow. Both Sweet Baby and their clients have denied this interpretation of what they do.
Not sure what I'm being misled over? It literally says on Wikipedia as well:
Sweet Baby Inc. is a Canadian narrative development and consultation studio based in Montreal. Founded by former Ubisoft developers, including scriptwriter Kim Belair and product manager David Bédard, the company consults on video game narratives during development to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within game narratives and studios.
Also, in every game they've worked on it's quite obvious which part they've been involved with, based on the above.
But people on this sub really just like to keep shooting the messenger huh 🙄
You know that in the wake of Suicide Squad and Saga from Alan Wake II, they stated quite clearly that what was "obviously" their contributions were totally wrong, with Remedy confirming on their end? It may not be inaccurate to state that sensitivity reading or consulting for authenticity when writing diverse characters are services that they offer, but their contributions to each game are not itemized. It's like when a bad port happens and people see Iron Galaxy in the credits, they want to see this pattern of Iron Galaxy being responsible rather than and then throw out any evidence of Iron Galaxy actually being a really good port studio. I get that you want to form patterns of why something you perceive to be wrong is happening, but the truth is that these companies' contributions are not itemized, because video games work more like a traditional business than Hollywood, and it's no one's policy to break out which work was done by a contractor versus in-house, so you'll actually never know. Instead, Endymion, or whoever it is you watch that picked up on the week's trending rage bait topic, cosplays as a journalist and infers a whole lot of what Sweet Baby does that they just didn't do, whereas an actual journalist would get quotes from sources to confirm that it's true.