Sweet Baby Inc. is running to Kotaku in order to try and do damage control for the company after multiple employees tried to cancel a Steam Curator list as well as the creator of said list.
Harley Quinn about to execute Batman in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024), Rocksteady
Sweet Baby Inc. employees Chris Kindred and Maya Kramer attempted to cancel Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo after he created a Steam Curator list that lists out all of the games that Sweet Baby Inc. has worked on that are available on Steam.
Kindred 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
Next, Kindred posted, “anyway report the f*** out of this group.”
Chris Kindred on X
Kindred then concluded, “And report the creator since he loves his account so much.”
Chris Kindred on X
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. Employee Who Tried To Cancel Gamer Over Boycott List Gets X Account Limited
Kindred was joined by Maya Kramer under the account Legobutts who shared a lengthy thread discussing the Steam Curator list.
As part of the thread, Kramer posted, “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
Kramer then posted, “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, Sweet Baby Inc and…warns people to not buy games they’re associated with? which could just list any game at all??”
Legobutts on X
The cancellation has failed so far and only increased the number of individuals following the curator.
As of writing it currently has over 191,000 followers. It only had 20,000 followers at the time Kindred and Kramer attempted to cancel it.
Sweet Baby Inc detected Steam Curator list
Following this failed cancellation and a greater light being shed on comments that Sweet Baby Inc. CEO Kim Belair and her employees have made, Belair and her co-founder David Bedard quickly ran to Kotaku to do damage control.
The entire purpose of the article is to try and shape Sweet Baby Inc.’s image as a harmless narrative design company. However, it fails at that as Belair contradicts what’s on her own company’s website as well as previous comments she’s made in the past.
She informs Kotaku, “Sweet Baby is, at its core, a narrative development company. That means anything from script writing to narrative design to narrative direction, to story reviews.”
She adds, “One of the things that we do offer is cultural consultations or authenticity consultations. For us, that generally means that we might be asked to look at a story if there’s a character in it who is marginalized in [a] certain way, and [the studio] wants us to connect them with a consultant who can bring a little bit of authenticity…But the perspective is never that we’re coming in and injecting diversity…For the most part, it’s the reverse. It’s that a company has created a character and they want to make that character more representative and more interesting.”
A screenshot from Alan Wake II (2023), Remedy Entertainment
The company’s own website makes it very clear they want to inject diversity into games. Their About Us section 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, the site states, “We believe you need diverse voices to solve diverse problems. Sweet Baby Inc. provides narrative consultation at any stage of development, boasting a talented team with vetted industry experience to best bring your story to life.”
Sweet Baby Inc. Services
Their Outreach section also states, “New and marginalized talent can change this industry if given the proper support. We want to provide this through our outreach programs.”
Sweet Baby Inc. Outreach
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. CEO And Co-Founder Kim Belair Compares White Male Gamers To Picky Babies
Belair also stated in 2019 that she did not want a video game developer to include a Frenchman, but rather wanted that character to be black.
She said at the Game Developers Conference, “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.
It’s very clear that Belair and Sweet Baby Inc. do indeed want to inject diversity into games and she’s just straight lying to Kotaku in order to try and save the company’s image.
It wasn’t just Belair, Bedard decided to hide behind his employees identities. He told Kotaku, “People can’t imagine that we might do anything else but DEI. They can’t imagine that we’re just talented writers, that we’re talented narrative designers and that people are hiring us because we tell good stories, because we collaborate well, and because we write video games.”
He added, “They have to diminish our accomplishments to our identities. They can’t imagine that the work I did on Spider-Man was story work versus adding pride flags, you know?”
Angrboda in God of War: Ragnarok (2022), Sony Santa Monica
As noted above, the company’s entire About Us section, Services, and Outreach are about the company’s “marginalized talent” and thus their identities.
He’s whining about how he self-identified the company.
Miles Morales and Spider-Man in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023), Insomniac Games
Belair would go on to tell the outlet, “We are a narrative company. That primarily is our work. We are not censors. We have no interest in false diversity or in tokenization. We have an interest in making stories better, and making characters more interesting, and in developing a stronger language around narrative design…Those are the things that we are really passionate about.”
“If you’re gonna come for my work, you can do that. If someone says I wrote a story and you say it’s not good, that’s totally fine. But if you’re gonna come for me at least come correct…don’t be loud and wrong,” she said.
It’s unclear how replacing a Frenchman with a black man makes a game better, but as noted above that’s what Belair believes, and that is the definition of false diversity and tokenization.
Miles Morales in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023), Insomniac Games
Belair also admitted in 2019 that her entire company is about false diversity and tokenization while she demonized straight, white, male gamers and even claimed they were standing “in the way of our progress and our innovation.”
She said at the Game Developers Conference, “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.”
A screenshot from Usual June (2025), Finji
Later in her presentation she returned to this despicable metaphor, “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.”
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.’”
A screenshot from South of Midnight (TBA), Compulsion Games
On top of that, she also admitted one of the primary products her company offers is censorship in the form of sensitivity reading.
She said, “We need sensitivity readers. We need risk assessment. And these are like, again, important services that I literally like list on every PDF that I send out to be like, ‘Hey, I can do risk assessment and sensitivity reading.'”
Kim Belair via GDC YouTube
What do you make of Kim Belair and David Bedard running to Kotaku in order to damage control after their company’s failed cancellation attempt?
Another company that wants to cancel their customers. Go right ahead.
As an aside, what annoys me about that character is that his eyes are too big. Makes his face look flat.
Anyway, Sweet baby can’t be the only company like this. I hope we uncover more in a similar fashion. Need the sunlight to disinfect.