A recent panel from the 2019 Game Developers Conference has surfaced showing Kim Belair, the current CEO of Sweet Baby Inc. encouraging employees to “terrify” their marketing teams.
In the panel, Belair is discussing the importance of writing consultancy and inclusion, and when discussing AAA developers she had this to say:
“If you’re a creative working in AAA which I did for many, many years: put this stuff up to your higher-ups.
And if they don’t see the value in what you’re asking for when you ask for consultancy, when you ask for research: go have a coffee with your marketing team and just terrify them with the possibility if they don’t give you what you want.”
Emphasis: Ours
You can find the full panel from the 2019 GDC below.
For those who don’t know, Sweet Baby is a narrative consulting company that provides services such as:
- Writing: “Cinematics, Dialogue, UI/UX writing, Barks, Copywriting, Etc”
- Narrative: “Story pitches, World Building, Character Creation, Narrative Design, Story Feedback and Tweaks, and more”
- Representation: “Cultural Consultation, Sensitivity And Inclusivity Reading, Risk and Opportunities Assessment, and more”
- Development: “Full-scale Game Development and Interactive Fiction”
Critics of the company focus on their work promoting representation and inclusivity out of concern that a game’s quality could be compromised by poor writing meant to promote an ideology rather than enhance a game.
Sweet Baby has made headlines in recent weeks after some employees criticized a Steam Curator called Sweet Baby Inc. Detected, who created a list of games with involvement by the company. The employees chose to publicly shame the individual who created the list and created a harassment campaign by encouraging their followers to mass flag the user’s list, as well as their personal account. You can check out the Sweet Baby Inc detected curator here.
