The Verge reporter Ash Parrish admitted to lying and excluding Sweet Baby Inc.’s cancellation campaign of Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo in order to push her woke narrative and defend the company.
A screenshot from Unknown 9: Awakening (2024), Reflector Entertainment
Parrish wrote an article titled “The return of Gamergate is smaller and sadder” that accuses gamers of taking part in an harassment campaign against Sweet Baby Inc. The article provides zero evidence of such harassment.
Not only does it not include any evidence, it omits evidence that Sweet Baby Inc. engaged in an harassment and cancel campaign launched by Sweet Baby Inc. employees Chris Kindred and Maya Kramer against Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo due to the fact that he created a Steam curator list that features all games Sweet Baby Inc. has worked on that are currently available to purchase on Steam.
Sweet Baby Inc detected curator list
Kindred launched the cancel campaign on X and labeled the list an “harassment group” a term that Parrish and other video game journalists have parroted. 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 added, “anyway report the f*** out of this group.”
Chris Kindred on X
Finally, Kindred called for the cancelling of KabrutusRambo’s Steam account, which is tantamount to theft, “And report the creator since he loves his account so much.”
Chris Kindred on X
Kindred has since doubled down on the call to cancel the Steam curator list and labeled critics of Sweet Baby Inc. and its agenda as “Nazis.
Kindred posted, “they’re just writing fanfiction at this point. The group still should be taken down btw, if not for the conspiracies then definitely the Nazis.”
“They’re doing phrenology in there,” Kindred accused.
Chris Kindred on X
Not only does it not include this cancel campaign, but it does not include further efforts to cancel the Steam curator list and associated Discord server by Sweet Baby Inc. CEO Kim Belair.
Belair launched her attempt at canceling the curator list through game journalist Bryant Francis at Game Developer. Francis revealed the purpose of his article was to censor the Steam list and the associated Discord writing, “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.
Kim Belair via InclusionFX YouTube
Belair informed 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.”
Venom in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023), Insomniac Games
Francis then made it abundantly clear he wanted both the Discord and Steam 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 Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024), Rocksteady Studios
Parrish’s article also omits heinous comments made by Belair where she compares straight, white, male gamers to picky babies and how she views these gamers as obstacles in her path. Belair made these comments back in 2019 during the Game Developers Conference.
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
Belair doubled down on this metaphor later in the video, ““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.’”
Screenshot from Tales of Kenzera: ZAU (2024), Surgent Studios
Belair also admits that her agenda is to inject wokeness into video games. Belair said, “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.”
If it’s not a veneer then it’s straight up wokeness.
Screenshot from Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew (2023), Minimi Games
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. CEO Kim Belair Admits She Wanted To Take Over The Video Game Industry
On top of omitting all of this information, Parrish even lies about Belair’s comments about terrifying AAA video game developers in order to push her agenda. Parrish writes, “The most widely circulated example involves clips of a talk Belair, a Black woman, gave at the Game Developers Conference in 2019. In it, she counsels developers to ‘terrify’ their bosses with the “threat” of ‘cancellation’ if their requests for inclusivity are not met.”
“But a look at the clip’s full context tells a different story,” Parrish lied. “It’s clear that Belair didn’t want developers to scare their superiors into inclusivity. Instead, she wanted them to enlist support from the employees — those on the marketing and community side — who stand to receive the most backlash from players if those concerns aren’t taken seriously.”
Screenshot from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2022), Ubisoft Montreal
Belair makes it abundantly clear she’s threatening to use social media mobs to reign terror on the companies if she does not get her way.
She says, “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.”
A screenshot from Usual June (2025), Finji
Parrish admitted to omitting the information in order to defend the company and spin a narrative that would make the Sweet Baby look good.
In DMs that were shared by X user YourReadThisWr1, Parrish explained why she chose to lie in her article, “We’re not gonna agree and that’s fine. We don’t have to. I don’t agree that Kindred calling for the report of the steam list/kabrutus constitutes harassment. Associated with that list was a discussion forum 100 pages of threads filled with terrible s***, up to and including harassment. Getting rid of the list, gets rid of the forum. And you’ll see now, steam cut that s*** out-those forums are gone (or at least they were last time i checked) And the list is still there. I’m not gonna fault Kindred for trying and halfway succeeding at getting a vector for harassment shut down. So that’s the first part. You see it your way, I see it mine.”
Parrish continued, “As far as the omission of this ‘instigating incident’ from reporting, ok lets look at this even holistically taking everything into account. Chris Kindred finds this lists. Asks folks to report the list and its maker. Reports are filed, and steam acts only as far as to delete/lock the forum. The list still exists. This is where this story should end and all in all, that’s not really report worthy because it’s an interpersonal conflict that ends in a stalemate. Happens all the time.”
Miles Morales in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023), Insomniac Games
Next, she posited, “But as we both know, the story doesn’t end there. It continues and what resulted of that interpersonal conflict was this ‘outsized’ outpouring of the grossest kinds of bigotry that blew up so big… well you see.”
“This is the story, I get that in respect of thoroughness and completeness, not sharing that ‘Kindred started this’ is upsetting and feels like a lie of omission. But what does including it do? How does including that detail materially change the circumstances of the story? Let’s be honest and real here: not much,” Parrish said.
A screenshot from Alan Wake II (2023), Remedy Entertainment
READ: Amid Sweet Baby Inc.’s Cancel Campaign, Anti-Defamation League Calls On Online Games To Be Regulated
Parrish continued, “Does what Kindred did with his tweet warrant the response, he, his boss, his company, journalists, and sympathetic developers received? No. Not even close. Kindred said ‘hey this sucks, lets take this s***ty thing down and the guy who did it’ and the response was death threats. And so you run into this thing where including this detail makes it seem like the inciting incident is on equal footing with what happened next and it’s so not. It’s so so so not.”
Next, she provided a bizarre metaphor to defend her lies in attempt to position herself on the moral high ground, “best analogy I can think of is like a woman is walking on the street minding her business. she sees a guy looking at her with a nasty expression. She tells the guy to f*** off. And the guy rapes her. the guy was totally within his rights to look and the girl was totally in her rights to tell him to f*** off. But the guys response to being told to f*** off was so far beyond the pale of reasonable responses that the event makes the national news.
— YourReadThisWrong (@YourReadThisWr1) March 18, 2024
Parrish would later claim she was instructed by her editors at The Verge to lie and omit the information to frame gamers as racists and misogynists.
She wrote, “i’ll share the conversation i had with my editors about this because in preparation for my piece i struggled with this particular bit and the conversation i had really helped me understand kabrutus and his ilk have a grievance against sweet baby inc that is rooted in racism and misogyny and has no basis in the reality of how video game development works. that’s it period.”
“And when you get into the nitty gritty of who did what when, (not, obviously the whos and whats that are necessary to explaining the story) that central premise gets lost,” Parrish elaborated. “and me personally, i have to remember what my piece is ultimately about.”
Superman in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (2024), Rocksteady
She continued, “and it’s not about providing a timeline of events, its bigger than that, its about explaining that the reason you’re hearing about this company called sweet baby and ‘gamergate 2.0’ getting thrown around is because there’s a group of people who decided they hate ‘woke’ video games and found a convenient scapegoat to target and a larger conspiracy to underpin it.”
“with that big picture thesis, those smaller details (even the ones considered important to the players involved!!) become largely immaterial to the story,” she justified.
Furthermore, she stated, “kindred’s tweets and his gloating however bad or ill advised they might be, is not the fulcrum which this story is made or broken and i understand why you don’t see it that way why others have the anger that they do about it. and I’d urge you to think about it this way: this story (mine, kotaku’s, everybody else’s) really honestly isn’t even about sweet baby. it’s not about defending them or protecting them specifically. it’s bigger than that.”
— YourReadThisWrong (@YourReadThisWr1) March 18, 2024
“it’s about explaining to readers that there’s a group of people trying to fight another culture war within the video game space just like 10 years ago. and they’re using the same language and playbook targeting the same kinds of people. but fundamentally, this movement isn’t gonna have the same outcome it did last time. these culture warriors are like don quixotes and have picked a fighty they’ve already lost,” she stated.
She then noted she was going to explain why, but never does. Instead, she states, “that’s the story, that’s really the ‘only’ story here.
— YourReadThisWrong (@YourReadThisWr1) March 18, 2024
What do you make of Parrish admitting she lied about Sweet Baby Inc.’s cancel campaign against KabrutusRambo and his Steam curator list as well as her admission that her editors instructed her this is part of a much larger fight than Sweet Baby Inc.?
Nothing has changed since the beginning of GamerGate (I consider it an on-going phenomenon) – the journos lie to protect their narrative and exclude the facts which make the woke clowns look bad. What is more baffling here is that the journo fully admitted her dishonesty in the DMs. Other than being absolute scum they are apparently idiots.