The Canadian Broadcasting Company, which is owned by the Canadian government, is the latest entity to join the cancel campaign defending video game consulting company Sweet Baby Inc.
A screenshot from “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” (2024), Rocksteady Studios
Matt Galloway on The Current with Matt Galloway, a show that is part of CBCListen ran shared contradictory information about what Sweet Baby Inc. does as a company while refuting a brief snippet of YouTuber Ryan Kinel accurately portraying what the company does.
In a clip from the program shared to X by LunarArchivist, Galloway states, “There is a new conspiracy theory gaining ground in the gaming world. It’s centered around a Montreal-based video game company called Sweet Baby Inc. And according to believers including Elon Musk this small, 16-person Canadian company is trying to radically change the video game industry.”
Yo @KinelRyan, CBC’s @mattgallowaycbc did a show where he played a clip from one of your videos, said that you, @ElonMusk, and others subscribed to a “conspiracy theory” about Sweet Baby Inc. and stated that everyone criticizing them are part of a harassment campaign. #GamerGate https://t.co/8cmcFCYVvF pic.twitter.com/iwqEFimZ69
— Lunar Archivist (@LunarArchivist) March 21, 2024
He then shares a clip from Ryan Kinel saying, “The controversy started when Sweet Baby employees, a woke consulting company, whose sole mission is to push the agenda in any games they get their hands on. They are all about diversity, equity, and inclusion. They lay that out. They said they want to take over the industry. They hate white, straight, male gamers.”
Galloway claims this is not true, “In reality, Sweet Baby Inc. is hired by the video game companies to consult on stories and help write diverse characters including, for example, the Miles Morales character in the most recent Spider-Man game, who is black.
After playing a clip from Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Galloway claims that Sweet Baby Inc. is the victim, “Now, Sweet Baby is the victim of a giant, organized harassment campaign and gaming insiders say this harassment shows just how toxic parts of gaming culture still are. And they are warning this toxicity has real world consequences that gamers and non-gamers alike need to pay attention to.”
Miles Morales in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023), Insomniac Games
What is left out by Galloway is that it was Sweet Baby Inc. employees who launched a cancellation campaign against Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo. KabrutusRambo created a Steam curator list that tracks all games Sweet Baby Inc. worked on and does not recommend them to followers.
Sweet Baby Inc. employee Chris Kindred attempted to get the curator list taken down and advocated for the theft of KabrutusRambo’s games. He posted on X, “The Steam curator harassment group Sweet Baby Inc detected is lead by this person, kabrutusrambo. Here’s them trying to be slick so they don’t get reported. Even with the discriminatory language filed off, the group itself still fails the code of conduct.”
Chris Kindred on X
Kindred added, “anyway report the f*** out of this group.”
Chris Kindred on X
He concluded, “And report the creator since he loves his account so much.”
Chris Kindred on X
Fellow Sweet Baby Inc. employee Maya Kramer, operating the legobutts account on X also called for KabrutusRambo and his Steam curator list to be cancelled.
Kramer, using the handle legobutts on X stated that the campaign was “spreading misinformation” has “increased dramatically” in order to excuse discriminatory behavior “with no consequence” and then implied that “authority” need to step in to stop this.
Legobutts on X
She then made it clear she was talking about the Steam curator list, “for example, Steam doesn’t have guidelines for curators (as far as i can tell) that would prevent someone from starting a curation group that focuses on, say, SweetBabyInc and…warns people to not buy games they’re associated with? which could just list any game at all??”
Legobutts on X
After this cancellation attempt, it was revealed that Sweet Baby Inc.’s main purpose is to push controversial progressive agenda items and force diversity on corporate clients. The company’s About Us section on their website reads, “Founded in 2018, Sweet Baby Inc. is a narrative development and consultation studio based in Montreal and working around the globe. Our mission is to tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry. We aim to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.”
Sweet Baby Inc. About Us section
Furthermore, Sweet Baby Inc. Kim Belair has made literally stated that her goals are about adding “wokeness.” She’s also expressed her disdain for straight, white males.
Belair said during a presentation at the Game Developers Conference, “We do narrative development in games and kind of beyond and we try to bring inclusion, diversity, and new ideas kind of to the industry.”
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. CEO And Co-Founder Kim Belair Compares White Male Gamers To Picky Babies
As for straight, white, male gamers she demonized them by comparing them to picky babies and would later claim they are standing in the way of her progress and innovation.
She said, “I think in our industry and in so many creative industries — if you want to look at film, and, television and any art form — we start treating our core demographics as a fixed and static value something that does not want to change and something that is locked in place.”
“So despite the changing face of audiences, despite the changing face of conferences like this one, we still look at our core demographics and say, ‘Okay, they’re white, cis, hetero males.’ And we cater almost exclusively to them. And the problem is that we don’t just cater to them like, ‘You know, here’s something that we think you’ll enjoy.’ We cater to them like a picky baby.”
She elaborated, “We feed them the same thing that we know that they love and we keep on feeding it. We’re like, ‘Here you go. We know you love it. Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.’ So then when they get anything else they react as a picky baby would, which would be like, ‘Oh! No thank you. I do not want this.’ And we’ve actually done this so long that what we’re doing is creating an entire nation of picky babies and they make us scared to deviate from what we actually want to do. Just in case these picky babies don’t want to play our games.”
Kim Belair via GDC YouTube
She later doubled down on this metaphor saying, “I do like to imagine that when we look at white guys and there’s several of you here. I think when we look at you we say, ‘Okay, you can’t possibly enjoy this.’ But I think they want also and maybe you want also to experience new and different stories. I think we need to step out of this rule that like white men can enjoy fantasy worlds, aliens, sci-fi, monsters, anything so long as its through a lens that looks exactly like them.”
“Because if that’s the kind of person that we’re always going to cater to, you’re never going to innovate, you’re never going to change things, you’re going to keep feeding the picky baby,” she continued. “And we cannot continue to try to create art under a system that is going to bar innovation for fear of a picky baby throwing a tantrum.”
Still later she made it clear straight, white, male gamers were standing in her path, “I don’t think it’s pie in the sky thinking to go like, ‘Hey, maybe we can invite white dudes to play as other people and experience different things through someone else’s eyes.’ And if they don’t like it, we have to start thinking, ‘We’re not losing. They’re losing, and we’re losing because we’re going to let them stand in the way of our progress and our innovation.’”
A screenshot from Unknown 9: Awakening (2024), Reflector Entertainment
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. Employee Chris Kindred Doubles Down On Call To Cancel Steam Curator List
Not only did she demonize straight, white, male gamers, but she revealed her tactic to change the video game industry was to terrorize game developers with the threat of a social media cancel mob.
She said, “If you’re creative working in AAA, which I did for many years, put this stuff up to your higher-ups. And if they don’t see the value and what you’re asking for when you ask for consultants, when you ask for research, go have a coffee with your marketing team and just terrify them with the possibility of what’s going to happen if they don’t give you what you want.”
“Because they have to consider– I say that out loud as a joke, but it’s actually very, very true because if you start to consider the people who are player and audience facing and you have to deal with mitigating harm and with keeping the sentiment around their game and their project positive, there’s like a genuine value that you could impress upon them both ethically and financially. You could say this is important,” she said.
Belair elaborated, “It’s also a valid discussion to have because if you’re working with a thin narrative budget and you work in AAA, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised or dismayed by the amount of money that marketing can give you.”
She also responded to the idea that this is just a surface level attempt to hand wave at talking points: ““None of what we’re doing is about ticking boxes or about a veneer of wokeness. We actually have to care about making this stuff.”
Screenshot from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2022), Ubisoft Montreal
Even more interesting is that Belair’s idea of diversity and inclusion is seemingly specifically about skin color and race. She provided an example of how she was opposed to including a Frenchman in a game because she did not view it as diverse enough and advocated for the character to be turned into a person of color.
She explained, “I once worked on a project where they had an all-white cast where they expressed their desire, ‘Okay, we need to mix it up a bit. How about this character’s like stereotypically French.’ So they have a beret and they have like a striped shirt. And I was like, ‘Okay, if you need to do that, can we at least make them a person of color?’ And they said, ‘Oh no, that would be weird. They’re already French.’”
“So I want to do better than this,” she asserted.
A screenshot from God of War Ragnarök (2022), Santa Monica Studio
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. CEO Kim Belair Admits She Wanted To Take Over The Video Game Industry
In an interview in 2021 with InclusionFX, Belair also admitted one of the main purposes of her company is to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity. On top of that she admitted she wanted to change the entire industry.
She said, “In 2018, one of my best friends and I, we teamed up and we founded a company. The original desire was just to write together. We wanted to write with the two of us and a friend of ours and we wanted to write games. But we realized that as a unit we realized we were capable of doing for others what had not been done to us, which was to support us, empower us, to lift us up, to value our talent, and to help build our skills.”
“And so, today, what we do is writing, narrative design, story building, story breaking as our first and foremost,” she continued. “But on a secondary level we work very hard to get marginalized talent into the industry, to protect them the way that we would want to have been protected, to lift them up, and to get them into an industry where they’re too often shut out.”
Belair then admitted, “And basically, I think, to take over in the hopes that some really dope people will be able to lead into a kind of a new era for an industry that’s been kind of been, you know, the same way too long.”
So, it’s clearly not a conspiracy. Kim Belair and Sweet Baby Inc. publicly admit what they are doing. And it’s obvious that it is Sweet Baby Inc. engaging in a cancellation campaign against KabrutusRambo.
In fact, Belair engaged in it herself and used her journalist ally Bryant Francis at Game Developer to do so. Francis wrote, “Belair admitted she isn’t entirely sure how Valve or Discord should remedy the situation. She and her colleagues at Sweet Baby Inc aren’t experts in online moderation—they’re writers. Their job is to create fictional problems in video games, not solve real ones.”
“She urged Valve and Discord to recognize that harassment campaigns are continuously evolving, and that communications platforms need to keep pace with how they’re being used to spread hate,” he said.
Screenshot from Tales of Kenzera: ZAU (2024), Surgent Studios
He then shared a portion of what Belair told him, “It’s clear that some kind of evolution is needed, because this will only get bigger, and I don’t mean for us.”
She added, “If this playbook can work as well now as it did 10 years ago [with Gamergate], it’s going to keep working in certain ways, and they will find something bigger and worse to do than this.”
Kim Belair via GDC YouTube
Francis then revealed the endgame is to get the Steam curator list shut down. It currently has over 300,000 followers. He wrote, “The steps both companies have taken to moderate these groups appear to have had some effect, but allowing them to remain online serves the organizers’ overarching purpose: recruiting “normies” with little knowledge of game development to capitalize on their anger and channel them into directing hate speech toward Sweet Baby Inc. and anyone else pressing for inclusivity in video games and beyond.”
“If those loopholes aren’t closed, those bad actors will have learned they can target other developers, and this will be the beginning of another massive hate campaign that will leave our industry and its people worse for wear,” he concluded.
A screenshot from Usual June (2025), Finji
Ironically, before this article was published Kotaku’s Alyssa Mercante also admitted that it was Sweet Baby Inc. who was deploying a playbook.
She wrote in her article that misconstrues and omits key facts about the cancellation campaign against KabrutusRambo, “Despite the intensity of the backlash over the past few weeks, it’s business as usual for Sweet Baby Inc. The companies they work with haven’t been scared off—they’ve actually offered advice and best practices for how to move forward, practices they have developed after facing harassment of their own, Belair tells me.”
A screenshot from Alan Wake II (2023), Remedy
What do you make of the Canadian government supporting Sweet Baby Inc. in their cancellation campaign?
