Richie de Wit, the founder of Bear Knuckle, which is described as “an inclusive business development consultancy for experience and up-and-coming game developers” promised to destroy the careers of anyone in the video game industry that calls out DEI policies.
Saints Row (2023), Volition
As captured by former World of Warcraft Team Lead Mark Kern, de Wit posted on X before locking his account down, “I’ve been seeing more and more hateful Gamergate-esque opinions. I want be clear on where I stand. I won’t tolerate any harassment, violence, or threats towards devs, minorities, and women in our industry in any space that I own or have control over.”
He continued, “I don’t care about your opinions and won’t go into discussions with you. I’m not interested in explaining to you how little you know of the workings of our industry, and I will report and block your account.”
He concluded by threatening, “And if, by any chance, you happen to be working in this industry and you are voicing said opinions, I’ll screenshot you, put you on a person list, and advocate that you’ll never work at a company I work for or associated with.”
I love it when they reveal that “yes, it’s true, we ARE forcing DEI crap into games OR ELSE YOU WILL NEVER WORK HERE AGAIN!”
This is exactly what we are talking about, Richie. Thanks for taking the mask off and confirming everything. pic.twitter.com/4brSuI3NYx
— Grummz (@Grummz) March 14, 2024
While de Wit admitted he will actively engage in this behavior, former Bungie lawyer Don McGowan admitted he had been using the tactics within the video game industry for years.
He detailed on X, “And it never occurs to them that the reason nobody made games ‘for them’ was because nobody wanted to make those kinds of games. Nobody wants your money because no one wants you in their environment. Take it from someone most of whose job was figuring out ways to get rid of you.”
“Trust and Safety departments exist to get a**holes out of the gaming environment,” he continued. “You end up creating them to get rid of a**holes, because adult humans don’t want to spend their leisure time with assholes. You’re a GamerGater? F*** off, you g**damn child.”
“Nobody wants your money. Go spend it on anime porn,” he wrote.
Don McGowan on X
de Wit’s comments also come in the wake of Sweet Baby Inc. employees Chris Kindred and Maya Kramer attempting to cancel Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo and his Steam Curator list. Kabrutus created a Steam Curator list of all games that Sweet Baby Inc. worked on and clearly labels them as “do not recommend.”
In response to this, both Kindred called for mass reporting of both the Steam Curator list and KabrutusRambo’s personal Steam account.
Kindred wrote, “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 then stated, “anyway report the f*** out of this group.”
Chris Kindred on X
The Sweet Baby Inc. employee then called for KabrutusRambo’s account be reported as well, “And report the creator since he loves his account so much.”
Chris Kindred on X
READ: ‘Marvel’s Black Panther’ Developer Admits To Discriminating Against White People
Kramer, under the X handle legobutts, called for those in authority to step in and censor KabrutusRambo and his list.
She wrote, “sorry no one thing has changed: the number of people who understand that spreading misinformation just lets them be racist in public with no consequence has increased dramatically. that has changed. probably requires some fighting from those with authority! probably. :(”
Legobutts on X
She added, “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
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. CEO And Co-Founder Kim Belair Compares White Male Gamers To Picky Babies
Following this cancellation attempt it was uncovered that Sweet Baby Inc. CEO Kim Belair advocated for game developers to use fear tactics to push her DEI agenda.
She said during a 2019 Game Developers Conference presentation, “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.”
It was also uncovered that in a 2021 interview with Inclusion FX that Belair admitted she wanted to take over the video game 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.”
Belair would deploy her own terrify tactic and use game journalist Bryant Francis at Game Developer to launch her own cancel campaign against KabrutusRambo and his Steam Curator list.
Francis detailed the conversation he had with Belair, ““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.
Venom in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023), Insomniac Games
Belair informed Francis, “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 InclusionFX YouTube
Francis then made it clear, Belair and company want the Steam Curator list shut down, “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 Alan Wake II (2023), Remedy Entertainment
What do you make of de Wit threatening to ruin the careers of those speaking out against DEI policies?
But I thought these consultants had no power and no influence in the industry? I guess what Mr de Wit is practicing here is the terrifying tactics Ms Belair was talking about.
He threatens others in the industry while bravely disallowing anyone to read or reply on his twitter account. What’s that ism again?
I’ve seen this type of hubris before. Not going to go well for him.
These guys sound like children. You know the type. The ones who stick their fingers in their ears and say, “blah, blah, blah, I’m not listening to you.” This is what they are doing when they “lock down” their account.
When they talk about going after people who work in the industry and cancelling them then they are practicing Fascism. Let’s hope they get what most totalitarians get and they get made irrelevant by the sane people in the world.