The organized cancel campaign against video gamers by Sweet Baby Inc. has taken a dark turn as a U.S. government funded organization Take This has called on game developers to attack their own customers for standing up to Sweet Baby Inc.
Miles Morales and Spider-Man in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023), Insomniac Games
Take This, which is run by Dr. Rachel Kowert, instructs game developers to denounce gamers for defending themselves from Sweet Baby Inc.
First, the organization’s blog post states, “If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been hearing about what’s now being called “Gamergate2.” It’s the latest targeted harassment campaign within the game industry and it’s aimed at Sweet Baby Inc, a Montreal-based narrative development studio.
This statement omits that Sweet Baby Inc. is running a targeted cancel campaign against its detractors. Employees Chris Kindred and Maya Kramer launched their campaign at the end of February following Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo creating a Steam Curator list listing off all of the games that Sweet Baby Inc. worked on that are available on Steam and not recommending them.
A screenshot from Alan Wake II (2023), Remedy Entertainment
Kindred made it clear that she and Sweet Baby Inc. wanted the Steam Curator list shut down as well as KabrutusRambo’s entire account removed.
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 wrote, “anyway report the f*** out of this group.”
Chris Kindred on X
Finally, Kindred concluded, “And report the creator since he loves his account so much.”
Chris Kindred on X
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 wrote, “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
These tactics are not unheard of for Sweet Baby Inc. The company’s CEO Kim Belair shared how she encouraged individuals to use fear and cancel mobs to influence game developers.
Belair said in 2019 during a presentation at Game Developer’s Conference, “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.”
Despite this overwhelming evidence that Sweet Baby Inc. is leading their own campaign and is trying to steal KabrutusRambo’s games by having his Steam account shut down Take This instructs video game developers, “You may be inclined to be quiet or cautious, but that’s actually not helpful. As noted in our resource “Empowering the Game Industry,” a major lesson learned from Gamergate was the importance of taking a loud, public stance.”
The organization continues, “At the time, many studios were hesitant to address the hate and abuse from Gamergate in any meaningful way. The reasons varied, but usually this hesitation was born out of fear of losing profits or concern that taking a stance would attract the attention of the Gamergate mob.”
Screenshot from Tales of Kenzera: ZAU (2024), Surgent Studios
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. Media Campaign Denying Company’s Influence Quickly Gets Exposed
It then asserts, “In other words, failure to clearly and unequivocally denounce Gamergate and the harassment and abuse done in its name created a space for that hate and abuse to flourish, spread, and become normalized.”
“Hate, harassment, and toxic behavior have no place in games. By taking direct, targeted action in a timely manner, we can mitigate further harm to talented, dedicated folks in games, and help prevent additional recurrences of these harmful events,” the post concludes.
Sweet Baby Inc. seems to be accusing their detractors of what the employees of Sweet Baby Inc. are doing in order to create a victim narrative. This is clearly being done to not only garner support for their own cause, but to use it as a bludgeon to attack their opponents and do actual financial harm to them, in this case through the theft of KabrutusRambo’s games.
Screenshot from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2022), Ubisoft Montreal
Interestingly, Take This is funded by the U.S. government. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the organization would receive a split of nearly $700,000 in grant money for the department’s targeted violence and prevention capabilities.
Specifically, DHS shared that the organization would receive the grant money as part of the Middlebury’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism to raise societal awareness, provide media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives and do civic engagement.
The description on DHS’ website states, “Over the past decade, video games have increasingly become focal points of social activity and identity creation for adolescents and young adults. Relationships made and fostered within game ecosystems routinely cross over into the real world and are impactful parts of local communities. Correspondingly, extremists have used video games and targeted video game communities for activities ranging from propaganda creation to terrorist mobilization and training. Game developers in general–from small, independent studios to billion-dollar multinational corporations–have lagged in awareness of how extremists may attempt to exploit their games, and how their communities can be targeted for radicalization.”
It then reveals Take This as well as Logically were the beneficiaries of the $699,763.000 grant, “This joint project from the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, Take This, and Logically seeks to develop a shared framework for understanding extremism in games. This includes the development of a set of best practices and centralized resources for monitoring and evaluation of extremist activities as well as a series of training workshops for the monitoring, detection, and prevention of extremist exploitation in gaming spaces for community managers, multiplayer designers, lore developers, mechanics designers, and trust and safety professionals.”
A screenshot from Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024), Rocksteady
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. Runs To Kotaku After Cancel Campaign Failure
Not only is the organization funded by the federal government, but according to Ars Technica’s Ashley Belanger, Kowert created the organization after encountering “a 2019 nationally representative survey from ADL. It found that nearly 1 in 4 respondents ‘were exposed to extremist white supremacist ideology in online games.'”
Belanger also reported the primary goal of the organization, “Take This research director Rachel Kowert told Ars Technica that the primary objective of the project is to develop gaming industry-focused resources. Her group’s ambitious plan is to reach out to big companies first, then engage smaller companies and indie developers for maximum impact.”
A screenshot from Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance (2021), Tuque Games
Interestingly in a Game UX ’22 presentation sponsored by Bungie, Kowert admitted the polling was bogus, “In 2019 the Anti-Defamation League reported that nearly one in four, was 23%, of game players are exposed to white supremacist ideology in game.”
She continued, “And honestly, somebody asked me earlier how I got into this work because it seems like a very niche area, but it was this report. And when I saw that I thought that number is so high it can’t be that high; it can’t possibly be that high. And I called Daniel Kelley, who led this research, and he was like, ‘No, that’s the number.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, we have to do something about that. That’s terrifying.”
“In 2021, they did another report looking at the same thing and they found the number was closer to one in ten, but it’s unclear whether this is actually a change in the landscape or just differences in sampling as it is with research sometimes,” she admitted.
READ: Bungie Senior Narrative Designer Defends Sweet Baby Inc., Tells Gamers “You Need To Grow Up”
Nevertheless, as expected, the organization targets white male gamers. Brad Glasgow reported back in 2022 that the organization’s presentation at the Games for Change festival featured a slide promoting “Social Justice and all the usual BS you would expect.”
Apparently there recently was a “Games for Change” festival where the @TakeThisOrg basically promotes Social Justice and all the usual BS you would expect.
Bunch of people who love preaching with powerpoint but without the data or research to back this up. pic.twitter.com/FbaNcwNLWO
— Brad Glasgow (@Brad_Glasgow) July 16, 2022
This aligns perfectly with Sweet Baby Inc.’s own philosophy as espoused by Kim Belair during her presentation at the Game Developers Conference.
Belair compared straight, white, male gamers to picky babies saying, “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.”
Angrboda in God of War: Ragnarok (2022), Sony Santa Monica
She later doubled down on the metaphor saying, “I do like to image 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.”
Batgirl in Gotham Knights (2022), Warner Bros. Games
What do you make of a federally funded organization engaging in a media campaign to change the narrative around Sweet Baby Inc.?
Well, if GamerGate helped bring Trump into office, guess what GamerGate 2 will do. This has the cabal of SJWs terrified and in turn they are trying to muster up support from the already decaying AAA studios which HR and marketing teams they collaborate with. Most of them can’t help themselves and will be outed and the anti-customer ideologues that they are.
I think the best thing is that they made some unknown guy from Brazil into this figure. Just some guy with a steam and Twitter account. And now he’s all in on pushing back with other people joining him. Polar opposite to what kindred and their ilk expected.
Take This is a terrorist organization. Changed my mind.