Sweet Baby Inc and the Modern Audience

Sweet Baby Inc is a gaming consulting firm based out of Canada. They exist to “tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry.” They have notable clients including most western AAA publishers including Microsoft and EA and a whole host of others. Take a look:

Sweet Baby Inc has worked on a ton of recent notable projects. Take a look:

Recently, Sweet Baby Inc has come under fire from gamers for “helping create woke games.”(they locked their twitter feed down as a result) When you get a Sweet Baby game, you’re essentially getting Gone Home, a game not made for the average person, but woke game journalists to slobber over. Now it is worth to stop here and define “woke.” Woke to me is adhering to far-left DEI and social justice principals and advancing those things through something in the name of an agenda. There is a meme floating around of a guy calling an engine woke.

Now, this meme misses the point. The engine cannot be woke. However, the company making the engine certainly can be. If an agenda can be pushed through it, it is woke. If it cannot, it is not. Now that we have defined woke, we need to talk about the modern audience.

Sweet Baby Inc’s Quest

What is the “Modern Audience?” Woke people would tell you the modern audience is what current people who make up an audience want to see. That society has advanced to the point they want to see fat disabled lesbians in the title role, for example. This is what Sweet Baby Inc seeks. The term doesn’t appear on their page, but its what they mean by, “We aim to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.” The reality is, the modern audience does not exist. How do I know? Look at Hollywood and the Flopbuster. While not every flopbuster is woke, many are, especially the biggest ones, including Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny and the Marvels. The Critical Drinker has a good video on it. He ends off buy saying the modern audiences are really what the woke people want to see, not what the average person does. He would be correct.

The modern audience is a myth. The audience hasn’t really changed, they still want what they’ve always wanted: Good stories and good characters. Having a fat disabled lesbian in the lead isn’t necessary a bad thing. However, they don’t make good action heroes. You need a strong capable person who embodies heroic qualities, and you generally don’t find it in woke things. So, this leads us to Sweet Baby Inc’s recent meltdown.

The Meltdown

Recently Sweet Baby Inc went after a Steam Curator who created a group who alerts people to what Sweet Baby works on. They wanted him gone. It seems to have backfired, with the steam curator exploding in following. Why is Sweet Baby doing this? I think they’re no longer getting future work, and they’re getting desperate to convince suits to hire them. But once publishers get the cold hard numbers, and find out the modern audience not only does not exist, but the audience that does hates your product, they will change course. Many of the games Sweet Baby Inc worked were failures, including Saint’s Row, Suicide Squad, Forespoken, and Spider-man 2. Now in the case of Spider-man, that had to do with the budget more than wokeness, but I know the word of mouth was not great because of the wokeness. Studios have to be paying attention, and they can’t be happy.

In the end, Sweet Baby Inc is flailing and will probably fade away after the current crop of games they are working on are released, and invariably fail. The modern audience is actually the old audience, and the old audience doesn’t want them and what their pedaling. Good riddance.