A Square Enix shareholder questioned the company about its business relationship with video game consultancy company Sweet Baby Inc.
Screenshot from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024), Square Enix
If you are unfamiliar with Sweet Baby Inc., the company’s mission is to push a progressive political agenda using inclusion and representation as a trojan horse through the video game industry. The company’s CEO Kim Belair has also encouraged individuals to terrify developers and executives in order to obtain her company’s mission objectives.
During a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in 2019, Belair detailed, “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 went on to state, “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.”
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. CEO And Co-Founder Kim Belair Compares White Male Gamers To Picky Babies
Belair also made it clear she has an animus against white gamers describing them as picky babies. 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 doubled down on this metaphor later in the presentation, ” 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.”
A little bit later she said, “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.’”
In fact, at the end of her presentation, Belair said herself that “wokeness” is the goal, “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.”
A screenshot from Visions of Mana (2024), Square Enix
Given the company’s stated objectives over 400,000 gamers have joined a Steam Curator list titled Sweet Baby Inc. detected that effectively functions as a boycott list for all games that Sweet Baby Inc. worked on that are available to purchase on Steam. The curator list has 404,166 followers as of writing. It is the second largest curator list on Steam.
The list has evolved over time and includes recommendations of games that do not push agenda as well as other games that do push agenda, but Sweet Baby Inc. has not worked on.
A screenshot of Sweet Baby Inc. detected Steam curator list
It appears at least one Square Enix shareholder was concerned about Square Enix being listed as one of Sweet Baby Inc.’s clients on the consultancy’s website.
Screenshot of Sweet Baby Inc.’s clients
The shareholder asked during a recent report, ” I’m personally happy about the shift from quantity to quality. I hope good titles will come out in the future. I’m concerned about the Canadian consulting company “sweetBaby.” Square Enix is listed as a client, but is there actually a transaction there? What kind of transaction is it? Will they continue to do so in the future?”
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Square Enix President Takashi Kiryu responded, “I would like to refrain from making specific comments about individual clients. As we shift from quantity to quality, providing content that is enjoyable and safe for our customers is also part of what makes a product fun. We will do our best as creators.”
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This line of questioning also comes in the wake of Square Enix working with consultancy group Black Girl Gamers on their Forspoken game. Forspoken was a massive flop and resulted in Square Enix shutting down the game’s developer Luminous Productions and absorbing it into Square Enix.
Luminous Production announced it was shuttering in February 2023.
Luminous Productions on X
Square Enix Representative Director Yosuke Matsuda admitted the games sales were not good during the company’s financial results briefing back in February 2023.
He said, “Reviews of Forspoken, which we released on January 24, 2023, have been challenging. However, the game has also received positive feedback on its action features, including its parkour and combat capabilities, so it has yielded results that will lead to improvement of our development capabilities of other games in the future.”
Next, he discussed the game’s sales, “That said, its sales have been lackluster, and while the performance of new titles with February and March release dates will be the ultimate determinant, we see considerable downside risk to our FY2023/3 earnings.”
A screenshot from Forspoken (2023), Square Enix
What do you make of Square Enix shareholders questioning the company about its business relationship with Sweet Baby Inc.?
It’s good that the shareholders are asking about this, but seeing as Kiryu’s response was to avoid the question and talk about making “Safe and Enjoyable” content, it means they plan to continue having these groups as clients.
“Safe” video games. You can smell the stink of the infestation, like a gangrenous wound. Really bad red flag there in the language used.
That liberal dogwhistle jumped out at me, too. SIE cannot be trusted to make unbiased games.
As more games flop and are a pr disaster for these companies hopefully we will see a shift in business from these evil companies. As always money talks and we gamers vote with our wallets.