Ohhh... now I get it. I had opted out of digging into this saga thus far. Had no preformed opinion whatsoever. Who'd've thunk a fuller picture would give me one more reason to detest the reactionary right?
I've been following a few Russians on TH-cam and other Social Media patforms where I just enjoy seeing their perspective and take on the current trends, whether I agree with them or not. You're research on this topic was very in-depth and insightful, clearing up a lot of misinterpretations yet still clarifying on what Kim Belair's mission is and SBI's role in the industry. I'm glad to be subscribed to you, Cheers
I watch the whole video since these topics are hot right now and i don't wanna get misinformed, overall it was quite an eye opener so props to you Parallax and Cheecken (I will also post this comments on Parallax). Now to sums up, here's my thoughts : 1. Short videos with out of context was a mistake, This is why IMO long videos on YT will still relevant to counters these misinformation thanks to these spread of out of context short videos on every socmed, and as mentioned it's important to make an statements in order to clear things and debunk the misinformations. 2. The true enemy is greedy executive behind gaming corporation and later the SBI employees itself. For this I believe that as long Indie games and Nintendo's Philosophy of their gaming development still exists, the video game crash won't be happened elsewhere (but probably it will happened in the western gaming spheres so these companies will reconsider their weird decisions.) For the Nintendo maybe i kinda biased since i was into Nintendo since 2018 thanks for having a Switch and having the game that i reason to have (if you wondering what games i mention it was Splatoon 2 and later Zelda BOTW) but don't get me wrong, Nintendo ain't all saints they also have nasty things recently (especially towards fan projects and emulations). After all i didn't buy a AAA games so much often as they expensive as f, and i have other priorities. And most importantly and the thing i will always remembered is that : 3. Reactionaries influencers that manufacturing "fake" outrage for an engagement and quick bucks can go straight to hell. This is why the reason i despise them so much, because what Parallax said was true, these kind of type is everywhere not only TH-cam but on other socmed as well (especially X) hence why i often click not recommend and even blocking the accounts because of their outrage malarkey using their audience as a airsickness bag and weapons just for click-driven money. The sad thing is this manufacturing "fake" outrage is not exclusive to entertainment like Video Games and Anime but it's also applies to Politics and Everyday lives like those misleading outdated research posts about IQs and Indicators (like literacy, Quality of Human Resources, and Educations) over the official legitimate sources, hence why nowadays i always take a grain of salt of information from every socmed posts and mass media press. (Something that i agree from your videos on the Other Side of The Truth). My heart was sank when Parallax mentioned Vic Mignogna, he's one of my favorite VA because of his role as Junpei Iori from Persona 3 (Persona is a game series that not only memorable, but also life changing for me especially Persona 4.) but in the end we will always have a mistake and it's important to learn from our mistakes then reflecting to be a better person. I will always remember what Parallax said on the video: "Because manufacturing fake outrage always sells, that is the reality we live in and i'm afraid it's going stay this way for years to come." Once again thank you Parallax and Cheecken for making this Video, it's quite an eye opener for me. P.S: I'm actually want to share this video on X but i'm afraid to get banhammered by Elon.
Hi there! Co-writer of the video here, you basically got all the messages we were trying to send here, I don't think short videos are inherently wrong necessarily, you can cover something fairly in a shorter runtime, but of course when making these kinds of videos you have to make editorial judgements on what to leave out so you can keep the runtime to something reasonable, the shorter it gets the harder it becomes to stay fair and include all the needed context. It's great that you related some of our political videos to this one, because yeah they do essentially have the same core message, which is that these issues whether it's politics, a culture war or whatever else, are not a football match, you don't pick a team and root for them no matter what. It's okay to have a tribe but you need to acknowledge the failings of that tribe otherwise not only do you become out of touch and lacking in credibility but you also make things worse off for yourself, you can't course correct if you refuse to acknowledge the problems, however painful that acknowledgement might be to make. Mainstream outlets lie, alternative outlets lie, leftists lie, rightists lie, and they also all tell the truth, at different junctures and in different cases. Not all equally, some are more honest than others, but you should always be a sceptic and never take anyone's word for it unconditionally, we apply this to ourselves as well which is why these productions have our sourcing clearly shown, so when you hear something from us you can check the original research as well and judge for yourself if we were fair, we absolutely DON'T want you to take our word for it, trust us because we did our homework, not just because it's us! As for sharing, feel free to, you're not gonna get banned by Elon, he mostly stuck to his pledge of free speech but his idea is you can say what you want but if you want anybody to see it you better pay that $8, "freedom of speech not freedom of reach", it's garbage but at least you won't be vaporised for posting our shit 😂
Thanks for deep diving into this issue. I'm so tried of this industry, i would never researched this that hard. Let's hope more people watch this video.
Hello there, I'm one of those people who's followed the whole "Gamergate 2.0" thing for awhile now. I wouldn't call myself a Gamergater, but I still supported them up until now. Anyways, I just wanted to say: Thanks for making this video man, I think you saved me from a whole lot of misery and anger lol. At first I thought this video would be the same thing, affirming the narrative held up by other people in Gamergate, but you've really helped me gain the independence needed break away from that thought process lol. I also really appreciated the nuance you guys brought to the table here. You didn't necessarily demonize anyone, but you were very fair/thorough in your analysis in the situation, so you didn't feel like you were biased to anyone when making this video. I wish we had more channels like this to help people break out of their "chains" I guess you could say. I appreciate you man.
Wow, thank you very much for the comment! I am very grateful to see that the design of the video structure, title and thumbnail actually worked in the way I intended. I am very happy to see that people can approach this video with an open mind and walk away from it having a positive impact. Thank you for making my day :)
Co-writer of the episode here, thank you so much for your response! You are pretty much the exact target audience we were going for. Me, Massi (Cheecken) and Parallax have each had our experiences with this triad of dodgy tribalist politics, culture war nonsense and conspiracy theories at different times, so naturally we don't want to do an "us" vs "them" type project because the "them" here is, well basically our past selves. Well meaning people can fall into these traps of malicious propaganda just like we did so we try to do our part dismantling it all in one place, the evidence has always been out there but sadly it's often scattered and so takes way more effort to find, so although we do poke a lot of fun and use lots of insults it's much more an attack on ideas and behaviours than individual people, like theoretically if The Quartering woke up tomorrow, came to terms with just how much he sold his soul to the grift and started promoting a more honest and substantial message to his audience, I would praise him. And I also would praise you very highly, it's hard to turn round and realise a part of your worldview or attitude is just completely full of shit, we put up defensive mechanisms to avoid this, you can see that in the reaction from some people who accused the whole video of being lies or a con job with no evidence, because even though what we presented is very backed up with sources it's too painful to acknowledge, so the reaction has to be "I don't know how, but it MUST be wrong", this was how I behaved for maybe my first 2 years of following politics/social issues, I wasn't perfect after that but I learnt over time to see less black and white, so genuinely it's a very strong thing to snap out of that, thank you for hearing us out and recognising that we have good faith intentions behind our work. For me the trick was to simply stop trying to have an all encompassing ideology, I have principles, some of which I hold to very strongly but I don't have an ideology, an ideology is a framework for explaining every political or social issue, the problem with that is when you come across something that doesn't match the framework either it collapses or you have to start bending reality around it, the reaction of these right wing conservative ideologues as an example of this, they can't comprehend that SBI are not the sinister conspirators they're labelled as because their ideology pretty much is "conservatism is the new counter culture", if there's no liberal/woke/SJW/whatever else agenda infiltrating all corners of the media or society to struggle against that ideology loses merit. When you get rid of these grand narratives and all encompassing explanations suddenly grasping the world is way more manageable, because you're not relying on stereotypes, stereotypes don't survive contact with reality, at least not prolonged contact, unless you warp reality to force them to.
I am convinced that most people talking about this topic don't even play videogames. Just to put out an example, a lot of these self-proclaimed 'gamers' threw an absolute fit about Alan Wake 2 and I'm pretty sure they don't even know why. It's not even that I personaly really enjoyed it, every single point mentioned about it is characterized in the complete opposite way it actually plays out in-game, even Saga being black is something that has a reason behind it (not that it needs it). One of the best and original games we've had in recent memory, and it's attatched to this absolutely exhausting and pointless shit flinging campaign. Anyway, great video, wish that idea of getting the interviews with devs would've panned out but hey what can you do.
In a way it was a lost cause with the interviews from the beginning. In the end the Sweet Baby thing only breeds more distrust between a subset of consumers and the industry at large. Would you accept an interview when you fully know that malicious actors online are gonna twist every word you say? Well, likely not! Also I think many people who end up subscribing to these ideas actually do game, but many of the people promoting the campaign may not. They definitely arent playing the games that are being criticized that is for sure! Thanks for watching! :)
The fact that you guys answer to every single comment with genuine interest/respect and by doing so clarify or even expand on some parts of your arguments stated in the video is nothing less than worthy of applause. Seriously. Absolutely blown away by A.) the video and B.) your management regarding comments/feedback/questions etc. Greets from Berlin und ein schönes Wochenende euch!
Thanks for noticing! Funnily enough I almost never post comments on YT normally, I haven't done so in years, I think the only exception was when I responded to some comments on another video of ours, I think one of the ones discussing the Ukraine conflict. It's kind of a 2 sided coin, part of it is about a good faith attempt to educate people and part of it is just a selfish feeling that I should just defend the points we made for defending them, because I strongly believe in them even though I know they won't reach everybody, and of course I also want to show appreciation for open minded and supportive people like yourself. Thanks again and greetings from London!
In germany we have a saying: "Rede und Antwort stehen." And you guys do that. And that is probably even as important as the video itself. Selfish to a degree? Well... You gotta be. Nothing, absolutely NOTHING wrong with that as long as your coin keeps spinning in balance and won't end up with one side being on top and the other facing down, for noone to see anymore. And even if that happens... Go again. Spin it again and it may keep that balance even longer than before. Kinda like in Inception... or something... Ok, now I'm going places, Jeez. But I DO like that metaphor XD Just a quick question: NeverKnowsBest also made a video on this topic. As expected, it is quite well researched and in the end a lot of your arguments can be found in his video as well. Do you consider to reach out to bigger youtubers like him? Joining forces on that matter could be a productive thing, don't you think? And maybe by doing so, the probability that you guys get a postive answer for an interview request might increase. It's just something that came to my mind after I watched his video today. Have a great start into the week. Greets.
@@jedermann3649 Very true, it's fine for there to be an ego side to it as long as at the end of the day the motivations are pure, as for that other videomaker I haven't heard of him before, I'm not necessarily the person to ask in regards to collaborations as Massi tends to handle outreach for that, but I will pass this on to him. Thanks again and likewise, hope you have a nice week as well!
I saw a link to this video in some shit flinging argument between strangers on Twitter, and I really appreciate the context you give behind this controversy. I think that about a decade ago, I wouldn't have participated in a harassment campaign or anything, but I probably would have taken some of these goons at their word regarding the motives behind Sweet Baby. I mean, as someone who's not in the industry, the idea of a consulting firm for video game narratives immediately sounds very cynical and potentially corrupt. With a bit more of the context you've provided (and some that I can recall learning before), it sounds much more reasonable. Of course there are developers out there who would pay a third party to tell them how their dating sim's shitty exaggerated dialog could be improved, then just ignore the feedback. Of course there are teams that don't employ writers of their own, or that don't have time to focus on all the flavortext in the backgrounds of their games. I have a friend who works at Infinity Ward who told me that they rely on contractors to make the UI in Call of Duty games. I figure with something that integral getting outsourced, anything is possible in the games industry. I guess a company like Sweet Baby is just filling a need. Some of it still sounds very cynical, but I can't hate a company for that notion alone. It's very clear to me that the bastards making a big fuss about this company are full of hot air too. Even if Sweet Baby proved to be nothing more than an assembly line that turns corporate funds into diversity quota report cards, most of the people you mention here would have trouble forming a coherent argument against that. The shit flinging that I saw was entirely uncompelling, even before I actually learned what this company does. I hope that more people will be informed properly over time about what SBI actually does. The more genuine explanation seems really unsexy compared to the bullshit being spread around the internet, tho, so properly informing people is an uphill battle.
Good vid, just a shame that most of treactionary won't see this, and even so, the damage is already done. This is the reason why I distanced myself from the reactionary channels and even turned off all of my history. I just don't want need anymore of this negativity anymore.
Wow, this is an incredibly well made video. Your channel is massively underrated, keep up this quality and one of your videos will blow up, I’m certain of it.
As a right leaning guy this whole woke stuff never really made sense to me in games or movies because if swapping races of characters and adding lgbtq characters doesn't affect the games writting and story then whats the problem.
This is genuinely what I thought as well, like a recent example was the new Batman cartoon that gender swapped the Penguin and race swapped a few characters, I heard some complaints about it but my reaction was basically "yeah and?". Was the writing bad? No I don't think it was, I enjoyed the show! Representation can add more angles to a story and maybe enable more people to relate to it on different levels, that's what it is at its best, sometimes it just doesn't really make a difference beyond cosmetics, the worst side is when it devolves into tokenism or crappy stereotypes, which SBI directly spoke against. Respect to you for not getting sucked into the outrage culture of "your side", I wish more people would realise that just because someone's on your side of the compass doesn't mean their word is gospel or they have any clue what they're talking about.
terrific video, very well made and hits the core of the issue, being critical without being overly condescending and exposing the weakness of thinking in these extremist ways and how easily mislead you might be
Thank you so much for this, I’ve seen so many rage bait videos from grifters because of TH-cam recommending them to me. I came across a few videos from Nerdrotic a few months, with absolute crude thumbnails and him saying how woke is the main problem in modern movies such as the current MCU without much talk about the real flaws. I’m glad someone like you and Parallax are calling out their scummy practices, but Cheecken if you are reading this, could you ask Parallax to provide some more evidence about Vic Mignogna in the replies of this comment? I remember when he first got MeTooed, I never really followed the anime community but on the surface it seemed like all his colleagues betrayed him including Sean Schemmel which really made me sad cause I love him as Goku.
The whole, "Suicide Squad game is w0kE! OMG!" nonsense never made any sense to me. How is someone getting shot in the head, and another guy getting pissed on by a bad guy, "woke?" That's the most un-woke crap I've ever heard. I'll admit I've never played the game and have no interest in doing so, though. Also, I appreciated your captions over the Hero Hei bit. Expected CC to render whatever he was talking about and wound-up reading about French food. Subscription for subverted expectations.
Never followed any of this sweet baby inc shenanigans that people were saying, but in general could tell that many CCs were "against" them in a way I may be biased and misinformed here as i didnt really watch other perspectives, nor did i fact check the information in this video (i really could not be bothered about video game company drama, just let me play my shit) but at face value, this video seems really well researched and it addresses and counters the narrative these CCs are trying to push really well, so genuinely, props to you on getting me hooked about a topic i didnt really give a fuck about for close to 2 hours
i think my issue with the talk about the two black characters just chatting, no tokenism or something (53:07) didn't work for me as an argument because this wasn't two characters who were black and chose not to talk about this, but it was an Npc talking with the Custom player character. In all games i've played, Npcs react to quite a lot of things about the player, usually gender, class, and if fantasy, whenever the player is a human, orc, or whatever. but skincolor never plays a role in dialouge with Custom player characters. there is no "flag" for skincolor, where this or that dialogue plays if they have a certain level of melanin. i see what kim is saying, it's nice to have two people of a certain group talk about something that doesn't relate to their skincolor or tokenism. but what she liked in that scene was just... how to call it... its the typical custom character situation. i could runaround in rainbow-pimp gear, with a face only a mother could love, and they'd still act like i was normal human being. despite how out of scene i look. but then again, my issue just is, i want Npc's to react to my character, if i look ridiculous i want them to comment on it. just like we as humans tend to do if we see something that draws attention.
Funnily enough, Kim actually mentioned this "custom character syndrome"! If you watch from this point on here: th-cam.com/video/GfMsxjWgUbI/w-d-xo.html she elaborates further. Thank you for watching :)
Belair's talk is boring, a bit self-congratulatory, and occasionally over-simplistic (ie the erasure of non-women abuse survivors)... Because it's a GDC talk by someone with a degree in advertising. There is a 100% it was going to be boring, self-congratulatory, and over-simplistic. I'm thankful you watched it so I don't have to! Having a cringy name like "Sweet Baby" or being mildly offensive or embarassing isn't a hatecrime against gamers. It was a thinly-veiled excuse to campaign against people of colour for the crime of their white co-worker over-reacting. GG would be a great choice for a deep dive, if any of the writers felt up to it. Turned out it was planned out, practically choreographed, over the course of many threads on /pol/. I was on 4chan at the time (and staunchly non-partisan at first), but I only found out when Ian Danskin made the timeline video. Blew my mind to realise it was SO astroturfed.
So I guess the TL;DR of this is that there were communication problems and a pointless conflict, and pointing the problems of things to a singular entity is silly, when it's the entirety of the system or there are other factors playing, honestly I only vaguely knew about this problem and it seems to have lost relevancy at this point, so probably either side made it seem bigger than it actually was. Good job, nonetheless.
Tbh I wasn't very interested in this topic. I saw one video before by someone neutral and didn't even finish that. Because the main problem, in the eyes of Kabrutus and others, is that SBI is ruining games. This is such a silly notion to me because one small company couldn't possibly ruin an entire medium, especially now that anyone can make a game with little to no budget. Sure, they could ruin SOME games, but what happened to "voting with your wallet" which is a phrase repeatedly uttered by these right-wingers? I don't care about some new games being bad, I just won't play them. I'm attached to the games I already love, not some projected idea of a video game that hasn't come out yet. For example, despite being a huge fan of Diablo 1 and 2, I've been boycotting Diablo 4 and the remake of 2. I only played Diablo 3 for like 2 hours because they made a trial version, but I never purchased it because I didn't wanna buy a stillborn game. Speaking of which, you mentioned at some point in the video companies enforcing online-only mode in single-player games. I think I found your channel originally from your video on Unreal Tournament, which is another such game. Have you seen Ross Scott's (Accursed Farms') video on trying to stop this practice? I'm just tryna spread the word. That being said, this is a fascinating case about how modern media operates. I'm glad you shone some light on it because now I'll know which of these influencers to avoid in the case I run into their stuff. Also, I applaud you guys for not taking sides, and rightfully condemning SBI for the way they (or their employees) have been handling the situation. Trying to shut down a Steam curator list is effed up. Also, just wondering, did Kabrutus share your video on his Twitter like he promised?
Im very well aware of Ross Scott's efforts! I am a big supporter of his ideas on how the industry could improve in relation to these online only systems. Ideally singleplayer games shouldn't be arbitrarily connected to a server, and MMOs or other online games you buy should have some kind of end of life plan. It may be inconvenient to the developers, but we need it, not just to have a product keep working past it's planned lifecycle, but also to preserve our culture. We preserve Silver Halide film, but we don't do the same with videogames? That is just plain fucked! Regarding modern media, I do believe that in many cases (assuming you give a shit about all this) deciding to buy a certain game, watch a certain video or have a certain opinion just boils down to a partisan decision. So for instance if you decide for yourself that Stellar Blade looks a bit silly and you don't want to buy it, people on the anti DEI side may think you might support the "uglification of women" in the medium, or if you think that a game really is pushing it with its political messaging, you may be seen as an ally of the boycotters. It shouldn't be this way! And this is where being honest about what happened comes in: We didn't make it a secret who we are more sympathetic to in this case, however Kindred DID kick the hornets nest. If we just glossed over that, it would have just dragged the entire message of the production down. After having made this video and being reintroduced into the world of culture wars and meaningless back and forths, I legit believe that the only way to win in a "culture war" is not to participate in the first place. Just play the games you find interesting and dont play the ones that dont appeal to you, that is how you won't turn into a miserable wreck lol. Kabrutus didn't share the video, however when I messaged him back then I didn't know how critical the video would become of him and his cause. I reached out to him again and was transparent about the video being quite critical of the cause, and he told me he would check it out, however I am not putting many chips on him actually sharing the video. We were friendly in our exchange on Twitter, but I do think that Kabrutus expected this video to be in support of his cause.
Ok, here are my 2 cents. While SBI has good intentions, its executions can be a hit or miss. Race swapping to me is just not creative enough and a bit lazy, should've made a new character instead. But GOW Ragnarok is one of the times where I didn't really mind since the games, even before the recent ones, have a history of taking liberties in its mythologies. (While somehow making Thor accurate to the mythology) Not related to race swapping, in FF7 Rebirth, there are areas where the locals can be considered diverse, one race in one area at a time. It would be nice, if it weren't for the fact that that even in yhe original game, it has diversity, and it's much better since it's on the multicultural side. Maybe they (Square or SBI )didn't notice it. I got the FF7 information from Think Before You Sleep of all places. You should watch his video on SBI, and take the parts where you would initially agree. That video would be good if it weren't for some hypocritical aspects like downgrading the main character by calling him something akin to a beta male while praising the games black character and the last third of the video. His community post about the game is much worse, to the point I realized he has skill issues in it's combat and wanting it to be like dark souls. Hah! I just gave someone a rabbit hole to uncover which leads to other rabbit holes. You're welcome @Cheecken and @ParallaxMY . Besides Think Before You Sleep is his "girlfriend", Brittany Venti, who is well known for being a long time grifter of maybe 8 plus years, with some very out of touch takes like saying that people who simp for their Vtubers are actually simping for the CEO of the company said Vtubers are in, when it's a well known fact that the CEO is best girl. Even the grifters that are in this video like Hero Hei and Rev Says Desu think she is dumb. Hah! Now I have told you about Vtubers so you will enter this rabbit hole, and you have no choice but to join. Also, play a real Shin Megoomi Tensay game. It's not a suggestion, it's an order. Thank you for taking my 2 cents.
@@MatPost Yes good sir , I watched TBYS and it was a mistake. Thankfully I felt something was off and decided to do what he "advocated" for which is research. As of right now, I wouldn't say he is actually rising. More like getting community noted for blatant misinformation on anime of all things. Other discoveries include: 1. Ex Brittany Venti having the cursed Sonichu pendant, which is a whole different rabbit hole that I hoped you didn't follow, even if there's a chance that you knew already. 2. TBYS deleting old content which includes criticizing his future ex when he started dating her and crawling back to said content when his break up is announced. 3. Brittany cheating TBYS with one of her exes last year and is rumored to be currently living with said ex.
Grifting and fascism, are two words I have been hearing constantly in the 2020s. I am going to be honest here, I keep hearing those 2 words and to be honest, they have lost their meaning to me. Anybody can call someone a fascist or a grifter and they don't add proof or they have proof, yet there are holes in the arguments or past history that has been revealed which reveals them as a hypocrite or a monster. I do appreciate the content so far, and I believe you do deserve more subscribers and support. Information such as this is great to inform the pubic of what's going on. As for the reactionary youtubers, I will say they are just letting people like us about what's going on. Will it cause backlash and prove the point of the other side right? Yes it will. That is the consequence of reporting on such topics. There will always be the cause and effect scenario. Also, I believe in the quote which I will stick by ; "I will vote with my wallet when it comes with video games". If it looks good and i see the gameplay of it on TH-cam, then I will buy it. In conclusion, good video, and I hope you will get more subscribers and create content, which will make inform the people of controversial topics.
Thanks for the compliments, just wanted to clear up a few things. For the record, we didn't call anyone a Fascist in this video for the very reason you outlined, the term Fascism has been diluted by being used too broadly, it's a very specific ideology with specific tenets, people like The Quartering might be right wing reactionaries but that doesn't mean they're Fascists, we called them what they were which is right wing conservatives. As for the grifting, we called these people grifters because it was abundantly clear that's what they are, we didn't want to toss that word around like a buzzword, they're not just raising awareness from their side of the political spectrum they are lying to people and misleading them, that's what we focused on and we showed numerous examples of it, maybe you were just making a general complaint about people misusing terms and it so that's fair enough, but that's not what we were doing for sure, we backed up all the claims we made and wouldn't have made them otherwise, calling them grifters is a totally fair characterisation, as just another example beyond what was shown in the video I recently read about how The Quartering claimed to have created his own coffee brand when it was in fact just a relabel of another company, a company that happened to be very "woke" in their social attitudes: www.reddit.com/r/TheQuarteringIsANazi/comments/wq9wpp/if_you_are_a_quartering_fan_here_from_jeremys/ So although I'm sure there's genuine political motivation from these people, they're also making easy money of off peddling sensationalised garbage, I would certainly call that grifting. As for voting with your wallet, you're more than entitled to do that although creating meaningful change through boycotts is usually very difficult, all I would say is please be an informed voter!
@@elwood6841 Thank you for the response and for the information that you have provided to me in the replies. Let me clarify the 2 words that I have used in my comment. Those 2 words are from the gaming communities that i have been in and have left due to the toxicity. Political beliefs have been infecting gaming communities and I keep hearing those 2 terms being constantly used. During your video, I was reminded of those 2 terms and commented. Again, thank you and I wish you the best of luck. 👍
I agree. The outrage towards Sweet Baby Inc (and in particular, towards Kim Belair) is absolutely bullshit. None of what the reactionaries said about Kim Belair are remotely true (Kim's out-of-context "terrify them" clip on Twitter is one example), and this video went above and beyond demonstrating how and why that is. We all got gaslit into believing the lies perpetuated by the likes of ItsAGundam and Rev Says Desu, and they went to town guilt-tripping all of us into caring for these things for the "sanctity" of our favorite games and movies. Reactionaries thrive on ignorance. That's why you'll always see them whipping up culture war videos three times a day so that people can get outraged over them. It pays a lot to lie, and they'll keep doing it so long as they have the monetary incentive to do so.
As of 14 minutes in: My experience has been that many of the people looking to avoid games that have SBI and similar involved find the correspondence between poor quality and especially ideologically motivated design to be overwhelming. If you look into the videos of numerous people who are speaking extensively on the topic, you'll find that they acknowledge that the game studios themselves are also responsible 23 minutes: Is there something inherently wrong with people objecting to Belair pushing for major established series to shift focus in demographic targeting? Presumably these people have been satisfied with the past properties they bought and encouraged the studio economically to make more of the series, so is it improper for them to expect a shift like this to change the game experience? 31 minutes: This is where it's important to understand that there are people who are participating in the ongoing debate who dislike ideologically motivated design. Not merely left-leaning design or right-leaning design, but *_any_* ideologically motivated design. A game having in-world politics is very different from a game being made to communicate a message about real-world politics 42 minutes: Belair mentions that there's a conception that white men enjoy diverse genres and environments when (seemingly implying only when) there is a human male white representative in game (presumably the player character). From where does this assumption originate and is it even coherent to react to, given that a large number of successful games (and indeed, full franchises) from each of the past 5 decades have not contained any such representation? There's ample evidence that in the western world, the demographics of gamers expanded fairly slowly until about 2010 with the mobile revolution. I think it's easy to look at this and conclude that the conception presented is incorrect as well as a motivated presentation of the state of the gaming industry. 47 minutes: I think there is no issue in criticizing the presented work of SBI regarding the dialogue modification for the unnamed dating sim. If people want to say that they find the motivations or outcomes to be contributing to a poor quality game, then they are perfectly free to. Alternatively, pointing games that do this out so that other people may know to form an opinion on the product they are potentially looking to buy is also something people are entirely free to do. 51 minutes: Belair appears to suggest that a stereotypically French character is somehow unpreferable in the game. If there is a market for a game showing such a stereotypical character, why ought the studio not follow the creative vision that includes it? This is another example of public critique of Belair's ideas 53 minutes: This again goes to the crux of player character as representative. Belair's experience of Mass Effect is not universal, not even applicable to another non-white person playing the same game in the same way. Her experience, as each player's experience is, was unique. A type of ideologically motivated design is having a character who is not a person themselves, but a stand in for a group. This is, as a critical gamer would put it, bad storytelling. I cannot know for sure, but I think this is what a number of people who would respond to this clip of Belair's experience as "that's a you problem" mean. I believe that that conflict with Kindred and the Streisand Effect of it is still that main driver of interest for this issue, if not necessarily focused on Kindred himself anymore. The ongoing opinion tweets of gaming journalists, developers and community managers are keeping the outrage that someone would be gone after for making a Steam curator list fresh. I think if that portion of the debate settled, we'd likely see grifters lose the ability to wave around this topic as a signboard for attention and money. Overall not a bad video, but one that I think a lot of people might call lopsided
Hi there! Co-writer for this video, wanted to reply to some of the points you made - We know that detractors of SBI also acknowledge other factors, we in fact made a point of including this, our clip of Kabrutus on Suicide Squad includes the part where he says the game still would've been poor quality even without SBI's involvement, and we mentioned that after, what we were criticising is people blaming SBI for issues when they have no evidence SBI was responsible for them, sometimes when there is evidence showing they were not, like developers who rejected claims SBI were responsible for Suicide Squad's various controversial decisions, or Saga Anderson's ethnicity, the problem with this kind of pattern recognition is if it's just a feeling rather than based on clear evidence you are at risk of getting it wrong, and there were several cases where SBI's critics definitely did - There's no problem with disagreeing with Kim's point on target demographics, if you're happy with how games are and the audiences they have that's fine, she feels there are more stories to tell and people of any demographic would enjoy that, I would agree with her, but if you don't then there's nothing wrong with that, our point with showing the talk was not to argue for every opinion she has but to show how her words had been taken out of context and made to appear more malicious than they were. - As for people who dislike ideological motivation, yes, I'm sure there are people who really do just want apolitical games and that's fine, lots of the games we play are apolitical, I've been playing DOOM 64 lately and there's no ideology behind it, it's a game about shooting monsters in the face with a Chaingun, I like games with a message too but you certainly don't need to have a political point with every bit of media you make or consume, despite being someone very interested in politics I also like a break from it as well just like anyone else. Our point wasn't that "I don't want politics in my games" is a problematic idea, it was that a lot of the people saying this were disingenuous, someone like The Quartering spends his entire day talking about politics, his entire social media platform is dedicated to it, when he's saying he's tired of politics he's being very disingenuous, our problem was with hypocrisy. - Yes, it's obviously fine to disagree with Kim's suggestion on the dating sim dialogue, although I liked the implications of the suggestion I can think of totally reasonable reasons why a dev would not want to use it, she was suggesting the dialogue tree should be expanded to have more detailed options, if the designers just wanted this to be a simple set of options and didn't want to go beyond that it would make sense for them to not want to implement her idea. The reason we brought this example up was to show that Kim's ideal approach is additive, rather than simply wanting to remove, censor or sanitise things, again showing how we think she's been mischaracterised, most critics of SBI never criticised the dialogue example because they never used a clip of it in their attacks on SBI, very few of them seemed to use anything from the talk beyond the "terrify them" clip, so we weren't defending that dialogue example from criticism, because there wasn't any, we were using it to show KIm's attitude, which we felt is more reasonable than certain ideologues have portrayed. - The reason the stereotypical French character was unpreferable to Kim is that the character was added specifically for diversity/representation purposes, as Kim mentioned in the talk, so the reason she was annoyed was the company was claiming to work on representation and then their representation was a typical stereotype. Also, the studio is of course entitled to follow whatever markets they desire, it's their choice, it was also their choice to take an interest in representation, presumably there are audiences interested in that too, Kim wouldn't have been talking about this if the company wasn't interested because the studios hire SBI, not the other way around. - Kim's experience with Mass Effect actually goes against your implication that her ideals are "ideologically motivated" and "a stand in for a group", which is why we pointed it out, the reason she praised Jacob as a character was actually that he didn't conform to any particular archetype, in other words that there was no agenda or group stereotype behind him, I haven't played Mass Effect 2 so I don't know if Jacob is well written or not, but that's not really what I was interested in, what I was interested in was that her ideals seemed to be very different to how her critics were portraying them, this example of what she thought good representation looked like was a demonstration of that, Kim is well aware her experience is not universal, she in fact argued that it doesn't need to be, she argued in the talk that she feels white audiences can relate to black characters just like she as a black person could relate to white characters like Nathan Drake, I doubt her life has much in common with Nathan Drake's at all but she still loved that game! I don't agree that Kindred or the Streisand Effect are the main factors anymore, simply because as you said most people are not talking about Kindred anymore, the complaints, fair or not, are now about SBI's role in the industry and the culture they promote, but yes the refusal of some figures an outlets to acknowledge Kindred's actions has done damage as we pointed out in the video, we pointed out that PC Gamer refused to call Kindred's attempted harassment campaign a harassment campaign even though that's blatantly what it was, and PC Gamer were far from the only ones, that has damaged their credibility and pushed people following this towards more biased grifter voices, would those people have listened to these more mainstream outlets if they had portrayed what Kindred did honestly? Maybe, maybe not, but regardless they should've done so, simply because we believe in the truth, Kindred did instigate harassment, so to talk about the origins of this drama without mentioning that is very dishonest, we're against that. I appreciate that you gave detailed reasons for your criticisms and were overall complimentary, but I think your perception that we were lopsided has come from a misunderstanding of our motives with some points, hopefully this clears some of that up, in a way calling us "lopsided" is fair because the work is obviously opinionated, we didn't try to be neutral nor did we imply that we were, we just call an issue how we see it, if in a dispute that means one side is 50% correct and the other is also 50% that's how we'll show it, if it's 60/40 then we show 60/40, 90/10 then we show 90/10, et cetera, that will obviously annoy fans of the side we saw as 10% right but that's something we're willing to accept, we're not going to change the framing of the video just to appease potential viewers, we're going to say what to the best of our ability we found to be true. Thank you for your feedback, even though I think your criticism was misguided it's always important to receive criticism rather than being in an echo chamber, I'd be interested to know what you think of some of these responses!
On one hand I love to see that the big boys are getting called out on their BS, on the other I am concerned that out of some stream of coincidences (like this video exploding, 2hour or so long videos tend to do that) you might get torched in reutrn. Edit. 41:13 this sounds familiar
@@elwood6841 One of my favorite youtubers LazerPig, made a video that blew up much more than he would have liked. That video had factual flaws in them and people jumped in to make r*action videos. When LP watched those videos he was shovked at how a reaction video where RedEffect strawmaned him for 30 minutes managed to convince about half a million people that LP was wrong about almost everything, meanwhile many corrections in RedEffects video were straight up wrong. Be preppared for bullshit, and be preppared that people will deffend that bullshit because it came out of their favourites youtubers ass.
@@MrFi-es2ie Again, we are prepared, of course our feedback is smaller scale because the channel is just quite small, but we are used to people misunderstanding us, ignoring the points we made, or just rolling with the worst faith interpretation of us because they didn't like what we had to say, I try to reach a broad audience and change minds rationally but I'm also well aware that some people won't listen to reason, if someone wants to come in being stupid and refusing to listen then that's their problem at the end of the day
Oh sorry I completely overlooked your comment before! Sure as long as you dont reupload the entire video and give credit you can reference it and use portions of it in your video :)
I don't think that's true. I certainly wasn't fast enough to pull back from your mom when I climaxed, and now she's five months pregnant with my baby. You should come visit your new sibling sometime.
As a gamer, I prefer sterile environments to enjoy the actual gameplay. I don't want to relate to anything happening, I want to explore the ideas it presents in great detail. Some stories go into great detail, and those are commendable, but it has no player control, or room for imagination directly (not a rule). I often find a varied cast to be fun, since it breeds a lively environment that doesn't have any narrow or isolated aspect that says, "These are the heros you are looking for." But also, highlights the human element (regardless of skin color), so seeing SBI draw a baseline in an industry that is lacking in many ways appears to be a good thing for a few reasons. Some issues in gaming (in general) I've noticed.. Stories are replications of their themes without any detail of their own, making them loathsome to go through in tandem with the gameplay. Characters provide a means to an end, they have no life or meaning apart from the theme/story's desire to crscendo or finalize, discarding the dynamics of each character to that enclosed perspective (many games I see from the onset doing this, or even shoving it in my face with an introduction cutscene, knowing full well every character I will meet is predestined to a selfish story). Minutiea often doesn't reflect the game at all (every concept is a blurb having no tangential relations to the game or it's story, and is a completely different exoerience. in other words, a bunch of one liners that don't fit).. which also makes another point of confliction with a game's self, giving it more of an identity crisis. Games and their story elements don't belong with the gameplay, unless the two are made inseperable. The modular design of story content often harshly removes any interest for me, but also makes it difficult to see cohesion irregardless if there is or isn't any (because the player experience will not match the developer's intent unless it strives for that direct line). I hope they can understa d the majority of these grievances people have still have an underlining issue, in that the games themselves are divisive in their product makeup, which will still provide a noticeable contrast (the one being misinterpreted by angry geeks in Suicide Squad's case).
art has always derived inspiration from real world politics to make those who interact with it reflect upon the reality that they lived in with a better perspective. what you're describing here is about wanting to justify mindless consuming by degrading art to nothing more than mere aesthetics, which is asinine to the highest degree. grow a spine.
We heard of this narrative about ESG scores but never saw any evidence of SBI being hired by a company because of this, it's just an accusation and we prefer facts to vibes
Environmental, Social and Governance? Seriously?? This is the business equivalent of saying you do charity work in your dating profile to look like a nice guy. If this is what you're worried about, SBI is small potatoes. What a joke.
the Game Suicide Squad always seemed logical to me, it's a game that tries to show the less pretty side of things. While the game doesn't look interesting, and I've never read or have been made known to that game's story before, I still haven't seen anything that comes close to showing any wrongdoing, or at least not directly, because there are vacuum chambers of brainwashers yelling and screaming about it without any analysis. The SBI employee seemed justified initially especially when you consider each perspective. Unless this is writing off the killed characters for good, I don't know why people would be upset.
If by the SBI employee you mean Kindred, no I don't agree with that, responding to the SBI Detected group with a harassment campaign wasn't justified at all, Kabrutus had in fact specifically told people not to harass anyone, although some might have done that anyway and we think the guy doesn't really know what he's talking about he doesn't deserve his account banned, which would permanently lock him out of hundreds of games he paid for fair and square. If by the employee you meant Kim though, yes we would absolutely agree! But yes the Suicide Squad issue is a farce, there's no evidence SBI was responsible for the problems people had with that story, if anything quite the opposite, from what I've seen of it there are legitimate criticisms about the game, it seems to follow on from the Arkham series but have almost nothing to do with it stylistically and takes a lot of liberties with the storyline but I haven't played the game so it wouldn't be fair of me to judge. The complaint about Batman not having a heroic death I also found to be a bit ridiculous, I'm a big fan of Batman and have been ever since I was a kid but I don't think he always needs to come out on top or have "dignity", there are some people who would be angry of showed Batman losing a fight against God himself because they're just that into the fanboyism and I think it's kind of childish.
@@elwood6841 For sure, everyone expects things to be dramatic, but I never really understood that perspective (or will take non dramatic things and make them so). Also I meant before the attacks on the steam curator page, seeing how aggressive people on the internet can be in light of someone else's work never seems fair or fun. Despite all of the haters anti-marketing the game, I am curious if any of them actually played it, or if those people are just so accustomed to expressing hatred that it's just a natural part of their day. Whatever the case is, it's sad to see a singleplayer game reduced to an online service that'll get forgotten in less time than the drummed up controversy.
@@e3.14c4 I imagine most of them didn't play Suicide Squad but I don't blame them for that, you can judge the story without playing it I suppose if you watch a cutscene compliation, although it would feel different of course, but the game from most accounts seems to just be a bit crap 😂 I think it's fine to judge others works harshly if that's how you feel, but knowing what you're talking about would be a good start point beforehand
One thing I feel is missing from this was the fact that a good few AAA games were made, and flopped, pdq due to their DEI et all bs long before anyone even heard about SBI's involvement in their making. The only way we are going to stop this DEI invasion in both our games and movies is to show it with our wallets. I for one applaud the Steam list and just wish it had been a thing before I had wasted my money on a few of my games :/
The problem we had with the Steam list is that all it is is a list of games SBI worked on in any capacity, if you just hate them as a company so much that you don't want to play anything they touched then fair enough it's a good resource, but if your concern is what attitudes a game promotes or is influenced by we know that SBI's influence on that varies from project to project and that's because ultimately they only have as much power as the companies they're hired by give them, that might be full editor's rights or nothing at all.
I agree with you. In my view Sweet Baby Inc is a symptom of a much larger problem within the gaming and overall media industry. The video isn’t bad, but I’ll be real with you. One of the most concerning things that’s been revealed by this whole controversy is just how willing these people are in making it an echo chamber. I believe there was a person affiliated with the company posting on X about how they will literally tell all the companies and people they work with to NEVER collaborate or do business with those connected/supporting the sweet baby Inc detected community. Which is kind of concerning since No. 1, SBI has an exceptional amount of connections to the AAA gaming scene (hell, even the fucking indie scene has some interesting connections with them, like Ko-op for example) but even then it’s really obvious what that would mean as a threat. Practically nobody would work with you in the entire industry. Which is fucking crazy for anyone to even vaguely threaten that, let alone flat outright say it. The thing that really makes SBI a difficult company to gauge concerning its influence on the gaming industry is the fact that it doesn’t just influence the scriptwriting, but narrative development as well. Which might not seem like a big difference, but it is fairly substantial when put into context. (Narrative writing is giving the story a theme, an overarching plot, an overall act structure and more) scriptwriting is what you do to actually fulfill the very narrative that you crafted (I.E the specifics of what was already predefined/laid out for the story, and simply creating the dialogue and more for it to occur). Combine that with the fact that SBI has so many connections (at least on paper) and it makes you wonder just how they created those connections in the first place. Personally, when I heard about some of them creating a “safe discord” to discuss how to deal with the whole SBI detected situation it kind of made me realize just how close some of these devs might be. Which isn’t an inherently bad thing, but it makes you wonder just how much stuff happens behind the scenes without anyone ever even realizing.
@@Nairobin Well yes a lot of these corporate structures are not very transparent and SBI actually has suffered for this as it gives their detractors a window to project whatever image they want, but as we said in the video in the few examples where specific claims were made they were either demonstrably false or denied by developers involved, including public statements and what we heard privately as seen in the example at the end So yes there's a lot we don't know and that's a problem, these economic structures should be far more transparent, but when we don't have the evidence we're not going to just take that vacuum filling image from conservative ideologues at face value, that doesn't mean you should like SBI but just acknowledge that there are gaps instead of trying to plug them with unverifiable claims As for that "safe discord", it's good you mentioned it's not inherently bad, personally I would put into the context of just how vicious this conversation has quickly gotten and its disregard for nuance or facts, these developers are being barraged with shit by people who aren't well meaning and don't know what they're talking about, if you're just a regular dev and not a pr person you probably don't have the energy or the skill to deal with such a storm As for that affiliate making threats, I think I saw this at some point but I don't remember the details, if you happen to come across them feel free to send them and I could address it, but of course we don't believe in cancel culture, trying to harass people or screw them over for having an opinion even if it's a stupid one is absurd, like trying to get Kabrutus' account banned which would lose all of his games that he spent a lot of money on, I don't agree with him on pretty much anything he said but I think taking all that stuff away from him is very disproportionate That said it depends on what the "cancellation" is for, "cancelling" by bombarding someone with harassment for having a dissenting opinion is dangerous for discussion and in general just an unhealthy environment to foster, but other times people have been "cancelled" by being called out for genuine malicious behaviour, there's a difference that has to be made there, there's disproportionate harassment and then there's being called out for being a prick
If your answer to "there's a reason the story blew up the way it did" is not "they tried to get a guy's steam taken down for showing what games they worked on," then you're as bad as the mainstream journalists who always leave that detail out of their reporting (another reason it blew up). It doesn't really matter what SBI was doing at this point, the reason it blew up is their reaction to people saying what they work on + the media's reaction to that.
I kind of agree with you on this. I’ll be real with you here, Sweet Baby Incs fall from grace was a LONG time coming and I’m happy to see it happen. But it’s also important to see these things with as much detail and overall understanding as possible.
Yet another video misrepresenting the outcry against sweet baby inc, I agree that it was a scapegoat and agree with most of your factual points about the situation but this video ultimately did the same thing towards the outcry against companies like sweet baby inc that the lazy content farmers did toward the company. The outcry was in general against firms that are used to consult in on game writing in general, especially those that espouse liberal view points and view DEI as necessary for all media due to how they can inject such things into games, of course the developers would also be at fault but theres not much the public can do to show displeasure at this than boycott sweet baby inc, they have already admitted to this themselves, many of the accusations against them while not known to be factual are easily accepted simply because of the type of work they do and their ideological leanings. I understand why you included some of these sections in your video, condemning content farms is very good, but the way it was presented also made it seem as if there was no reason for all of this to happen in the first place and sweet baby inc couldn't have done anything for people to condemn them when that simply isn't true, in fact the entire reason it blew up was from the streisand effect of trying to take down a steam group that only categorizes the games they've worked on and nothing more. It made them seem desperate and guilty as all hell of the things people accused them of off hand (whether true or not). To top this off the process she was explaining in that conference is very much the nature of liberal writing in general, increasing output of ideology or inclusion or DEI within the work until the primary audience simply accepts and likes any game marketed toward them regardless of anything, in fact Hollywood and most media do the same thing as products and people are absolutely tired of it, the fact a company's entire job subsists off of similar work ticks people off understandably.
Dude, we literally mentioned the streisand effect and what Chris Kindred did in the video multiple times, at the beginning and the end, we explicitly said that Kindred had created much of the mess SBI is in by trying to launch a cancel campaign that backfired dramatically, that SBI didn't help themselves by not condemning this behaviour, and that the mainstream press were shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring this and not calling a spade a spade in regards to what Kindred did, the things you are saying we didn't talk about are in the video, we did not make it seem like the backlash came out of nowhere, we spent the whole introduction talking about what sparked it, if you missed that that's on you We also talked about consulting more broadly as well and why it might and might not be liked or welcome, and what SBI are actually about, if you listen to how we explained Kim Belair's arguments and you still don't agree with them then that's fine, you aren't who we were criticising, we were criticising the people who blatantly lied about what she had to say and fed the worst faith interpretation of her remarks they could possibly drum up, when we heard what Kim's idea of DEI is we found ourselves sympathetic to it and made no secret of that in the video, so that's why we didn't represent it as a bad thing, but if you don't like it that's fine, we can disagree on the interpretations, just not the facts Also, if the accusations against them are being accepted because of their ideological leanings even if there's no proof for them (or they're proven to be false), that's a big problem, even if you hate someone or their ideas, it's not good to tell blatant lies about them, warping your own understanding of the issue and others, this is again a point we made in the video So I don't mean to be harsh but your criticisms don't really make any sense, they're based on the idea that we ignored a bunch of points that we went out of our way to bring up, if we made a point of including these issues and you're still going to complain that we ignored that side of things I don't know what more we can do for you, sorry
@@elwood6841 You did bring up most of the points but only in an off hand way as if sweet baby inc had no real reason to be persecuted, in fact you brought up Kim's terrible presentation on marketing and tried to defend the very things that people disagree with her and the company about, you did a very good job with presenting facts its simply the opinions themselves that I and many others disagree with. The sympathy for sweet baby inc is understandable considering all the shitty content farms but this company is very much emblematic of the troubles people have with gaming in general, in point of fact the defense of "politicizing" video games, your counterpoints to these terrible youtubers were well done however it goes far outside of the scope of the video. This part can be taken as a strawman of the reason people are done with many modern games by using some off-hand comments made by a couple of idiots online who don't know how to express their reasoning, I enjoyed the research, but defending Kim's points was something I very much stand against (outside of intellectual exercise) and regardless of their capacity of work in a game I feel the company should be boycotted.
@@MontySlython We absolutely didn't present these things in an offhand way, I'm just going to quote straight from the script: "The boycott community got a massive boost after certain SBI employees tried to instigate a harassment campaign against the group, encouraging their followers to mass report the group and Kabrutus personally to Valve, hoping that they would get banned from the Steam platform. This backfired massively, as commentators picked up on the story masses of people joined up to the group and began to speak against Sweet Baby, Valve confirmed the group and its founder were going nowhere, the employees and Sweet Baby ended up having to private their accounts instead to avoid the backlash, and the main instigator of the harassment ended up getting suspended by Twitter for breaking the rules. It was a classic case of the Streisand Effect, rather than criticism towards SBI being silenced many gaming circles, especially with a conservative leaning, became aware of the company and their questionable practices." "Chris Kindred unequivocally kicked the hornet’s nest. If Chris didn’t instruct people to report the SBI Detected curator page, and to report Kabrutus’ profile for good measure too, the Streisand Effect would have been completely circumvented, no one except for a small minority would have given much of a shit about SBI and this entire sharade wouldn't have escalated to this embarrassment that we call a culture war. Games magazines didn’t holistically cover this story. While Sweet Baby Inc are victims of a smear campaign predominantly due to the spread of misinformation, thanks to loudmouth employees who thought it was a great idea to silence their detractors the company itself was a bad bad Baby. No statements from the company denouncing the employees actions were issued, nor was anyone fired, nor did outlets such as PC Gamer just call a harassment campaign a harassment campaign, this gave ideologues such as The Quartering ample ammunition in order to spread their narrative far and wide." As you can see in the quotes we absolutely did not do this, we said very clearly that the reason this whole thing got as big as it did was because of the cancel campaign, that was why the boycott got a massive surge of support, we also made it clear what SBI do and that yes, they do have an agenda and some people won't like it, we never said or implied that there was no reason for the boycott, just that much of the propaganda used to justify it is false. The "couple of idiots" we used as examples are the media personalities behind the boycott, they are the ones fuelling it and driving it, if you don't share their words and their views then the video isn't an attack on you and you shouldn't take it as such. If you disagree with our views on SBI or cultural issues, that's totally fine, but you didn't just say you *disagreed*, you said we *misrepresented*, and you said that we misrepresented the situation by acting as if SBI had no reason to be persecuted, and that's why I have to give pushback there, you accused us of misrepresentation and then misrepresented our presentation yourself.
what a bad video...the arguments you are making, make no sense. its exactly like everybody portraits it. SBI is just full of ideology and not demographic representation. even on the argument with the 2 black guys (mass effect), you yourself points out that skincolor doesnt matter in this instance, its just a good written and executed dialogue. yet she herself claims it to be this awesome moment where skincolor is very representative for her. its just forcing another ones opinion onto media, nobody wants and likes that, no matter the intention. think of the company that she was consulting...maybe they just wanted her input on critical scenes and wanted to know, if they should cut them out ahead or if they are managable - and they did not plan to invest for more advanced dialogue like she suggested, as she saw this oppurtunity - it was probably not her job and she was let go. they probably even hired her, after she scared their marketing team to investigate such critical scenes (as she was scaring them with the idea of bad press) and that was all she was hired for. as you said in the beginning: we dont know, its all just hearsay and one opinion...and all your arguments that you build on in this video just crumble - because its only one perspective on the matter.
You do realise that what we pointed out with the Mass Effect example, that Jacob was well written and not an archetype, was EXACTLY what Kim Belair was praising, right? That's not an opinion we formed by ourselves, we got it from her talk, that characterisation was exactly why she thought it was an awesome moment, she wasn't forcing an opinion on anyone she was explaining what the moment meant to her to show what characterisation she would like to see in stories. Yes, not wanting to use more advanced dialogue for the dating example is probably why they cut her suggestion, but it's hilarious that you suggest this would be her not doing her job properly and being let go, if you bothered to pay attention to the talk she said that she was thanked for her work by the company and they liked her service, the disappointment with how things went was on her end. Even more clownish is that you base your assumption she somehow got the boot because you think she intimidated marketing people into getting her hired in the first place, where did you get that idea from? An out of context clip we dedicated an entire segment to explaining as misrepresented. What we said was that we don't know and a lot of this is hearsay, yes, but you missed out a very important point we made at the end of that statement, which was that although there is a lot of mystery around SBI's work when their detractors have made specific claims these claims have been proven wrong, we gave specific examples of this like Saga Anderson's race and Suicide Squad's story. And yes, the video is only one perspective on the matter, because it's an opinion piece, if you want other people's opinions you're welcome to go and watch other videos about the topic, as I'm sure you already did given the bias shown in your comment, our opinion just happened to be one you didn't like hearing, that doesn't mean it's wrong. So the reason our arguments didn't make sense to you is because you didn't pay attention to them and stuck with the image that was already in your head, if you consciously choose not to listen then obviously you'll be deaf to our points, but at the end of the day that's a you problem not an us problem.
@@elwood6841 You are pointing at the exact problem, its her opinion and views. she has no highness or advantage than any other gamer regarding representation in content. yet ask any gamer and they would rather not have a 3rd hand in the character-writing/developement than wanted to be guided. gaming is entertainment, subjective media and not some community plattform (except maybe sandboxes or smth like that). we just want good writing, having fun with a game despite if it represents us or not. and yet she is standing there and sees it as a kind of way to advance social acceptance - its just not, thats only her opinion. she can publish that in any magazine or blog but as a consultant that has a clear ideology, its just wrong on so many levels. not even speaking of the representative side of that. I think you missunderstood me there, sorry if i was unclear. i was talking about how "rewriting the dialogue" wasnt her job at this point. in regards to her earlier mention of "putting fear into the marketing team", this is the outcome. they probably got her to make sure the company doesnt trip over the things she was warning them about. but this was her only job, that she even created herself. and a suggestion to advance the dialogue may alter the game, takes more time and money to develope, so they just cut the content. but i dont know either how it happend. im just telling you, we only hear her side, just some narrative. my narrative could be true aswell, the circumstances would be the same. and yes, you thank every external consultant with a smile while you part ways - thats just business practice. you can even get praised for going out of your way for doing all this extra work but on the company-side everybody just thinks "you did everything else but your job". its business language narrated in a talk about herself...nothing to add to that. yeah you pointed that out but this is just a strawman, sorry. what claims and rumors the internet makes up is totally different from what you claim and think about yourself (and what you want to represent to others). thats why im only referring to her own words and not what anybody else has claimed. as a gamer i think of the idea to consult that ideology for story-writing is what is going wrong for years with the media industry...entertainment went downhill fast in the last few years, thats undeniable. and most of the content that is actually enjoyable just doesnt care about represantation of such things. there are so many things that need to stop with influencing entertainment and even the so-called "minorities in need of help" are speaking up against it. and thats why SBI is even talked about this much or even compared to gamergate. the details of who and where dont matter, we're talking about that this is even happening. anything more like the steam-curator or any other aftermath is not what we are talking about on this issue. the fact that this company exists and their businessmodel and how they do it and what they do is the problem. yeah thats why im commenting. im free to publish my opinion too and iam sure you dont dislike the interaction with your video, from an algorythm-perspective. but you are just seeing facts, because thats what one side says. its not very objective to just represent it like this. and you are clearly not showing only your opinion because you try to show facts and try to explain stuff with certain sources. but those sources can also be interpreted differently, like i showed you, and are heavily onesided - you dont present that, yet you take it as fact, which is just wrong for the reasons mentioned above. uhm yeah sure and i will surely watch other videos...i just find it fascinating while you put in that much work to make 1,5h of content talking while its so easily knocked down. and i was also intrigued if i maybe just got something wrong or missed something essentially...but no, you are just telling me that i dont like it, while avoiding the biggest criticism: you dont know it better either, yet you are telling a different story and harp on details while missing the bigger conversation.
@@knighToFdemonS "having fun with a game despite if it represents us or not" is something Kim herself talked about as we showed in the video, she mentioned numerous times that she enjoyed playing characters unlike herself, like Nathan Drake, yes she has a subjective opinion on what stories in games are for, and the companies she works with wanted that contribution, she didn't force it on anyone, and guess what? While some of the games SBI worked on were trashed like Suicide Squad, others like Alan Wake 2 are well liked. I'm not even going to bother having the argument about the dating sim example further I you already have, because your point is based on assumptions you pulled out of thin air. If you think consultation is bad, that's fine, we were not focused on going to bat for consultants although we see why some would value them, we were pointing out specifically that misinformation surrounding this topic is messed up, even if you dislike the idea of these sorts of consultancies, which is a fair opinion to have, you should have the integrity to recognise where people on your side of the argument are misleading people, your focus is not the same as ours. You are indeed free to publish your opinion, we have an uncensored comments section and we like our ideas being challenged, we don't want an echo chamber and scrutiny is healthy, but I don't give a shit about your value to the algorithm, I co-wrote the video and I don't manage the channel, I would love more people to watch it but the analytics are secondary to me. Yes, we show facts and sources as well as our opinion, that's obvious, it would be pretty stupid to form an opinion without any facts and obviously we formed our opinion based on evidence, we showed that evidence. Yes, we are one sided, we are not hiding it, we are not pretending to be neutral or impartial, we researched the topic, formed our opinion then presented it, we're not obligated to argue against ourselves or give a voice to the opposite take, as I said before you're free to watch other videos with other opinions and clearly you already have, many of those other videos I have no doubt are opinionated in nature and not neutral and that's okay, as long as you don't claim to be neutral you're not obligated to be. I didn't tell you I don't like what you said just because I don't like it, I pointed out several instances where you misunderstood our arguments, if you understood but disagreed with our end conclusions I would have no problem with that, I'm not going to budge on the facts because they're just that, the facts, the interpretation of them is up to you. You can of course reject the facts as well, I can't force you to see what I want you to see, but then the conversation is a pointless one and it's just 2 people talking past each other, if you want to do that then you will quickly find you'll be talking to yourself.
Whelp. 1 hour 43 minutes. Great vid. My take on this: Did sbi solely responsible for enshittification of gaming? Nope, many more factor than that. Did all game sbi working for is a shit game or worse than their predecessor? Yes of course. Occams Razor. Unless you have devinite proof otherwise, flaming this discourse is the best way to show game dev we reject this ideology. It's also entertaining, ngl. Edit :A little addition. I watch asmon, quartering, and gundam for years. Have some disagreement with their content of course. I remember quartering said long ago: Gamers don't mind politics in the game. Just not real world politics. You said they put word into kim's mouth but you also do the exact same thing. You called them grifter? Look in the mirror, because so do you.
"I watch asmon, quartering," So sorry to hear that. Hope you one day gather the strength to stop watching them. Have no idea who gundam is but I doubt it's anyone of any worth.
Its not just about sbi, it about the ideology that is fostering in society, for me " build back better " normally attached to these activist is disgusting because that means a destruction of what these activist are building on top of.
Then I would point you to the end message of the video, which is that even if you're in the same political camp as the kinds of people attacking SBI we encourage you to think for yourself, just because you might be right wing or see yourself as "anti woke" doesn't mean you have to take the words of people using the same labels at face value, if you do that you're essentially polluting your own worldview with lies for the sake of tribalism and that helps no one For us it was about SBI, which is why except for a few references to issues like racism and what representation should be we focused on examples of misinformation and disproving them
@@earthforge3578 Being in a tribe and tribalism are 2 different things, you can be in a group, just don't ignore its faults or try to excuse them just because the problem is coming from "your team", because everyone is worse off if you can't look in the mirror
The saga continues... ☔
Saga you say, probably should be race swapped for a lesbian of colour.
@@calumlittle9828I can tell that you're not the sharpest tool in the shed. Did you get dropped as a baby, Calum?
Ohhh... now I get it. I had opted out of digging into this saga thus far. Had no preformed opinion whatsoever. Who'd've thunk a fuller picture would give me one more reason to detest the reactionary right?
I came over from parallax’s channel. you deserve so much more subs. The production value and research was extremely high quality and on point
I've been following a few Russians on TH-cam and other Social Media patforms where I just enjoy seeing their perspective and take on the current trends, whether I agree with them or not.
You're research on this topic was very in-depth and insightful, clearing up a lot of misinterpretations yet still clarifying on what Kim Belair's mission is and SBI's role in the industry.
I'm glad to be subscribed to you, Cheers
I'm glad you are my viewer! Thanks for the kind words :)
I watch the whole video since these topics are hot right now and i don't wanna get misinformed, overall it was quite an eye opener so props to you Parallax and Cheecken (I will also post this comments on Parallax).
Now to sums up, here's my thoughts :
1. Short videos with out of context was a mistake,
This is why IMO long videos on YT will still relevant to counters these misinformation thanks to these spread of out of context short videos on every socmed, and as mentioned it's important to make an statements in order to clear things and debunk the misinformations.
2. The true enemy is greedy executive behind gaming corporation and later the SBI employees itself.
For this I believe that as long Indie games and Nintendo's Philosophy of their gaming development still exists, the video game crash won't be happened elsewhere (but probably it will happened in the western gaming spheres so these companies will reconsider their weird decisions.)
For the Nintendo maybe i kinda biased since i was into Nintendo since 2018 thanks for having a Switch and having the game that i reason to have (if you wondering what games i mention it was Splatoon 2 and later Zelda BOTW) but don't get me wrong, Nintendo ain't all saints they also have nasty things recently (especially towards fan projects and emulations). After all i didn't buy a AAA games so much often as they expensive as f, and i have other priorities.
And most importantly and the thing i will always remembered is that :
3. Reactionaries influencers that manufacturing "fake" outrage for an engagement and quick bucks can go straight to hell.
This is why the reason i despise them so much, because what Parallax said was true, these kind of type is everywhere not only TH-cam but on other socmed as well (especially X) hence why i often click not recommend and even blocking the accounts because of their outrage malarkey using their audience as a airsickness bag and weapons just for click-driven money.
The sad thing is this manufacturing "fake" outrage is not exclusive to entertainment like Video Games and Anime but it's also applies to Politics and Everyday lives like those misleading outdated research posts about IQs and Indicators (like literacy, Quality of Human Resources, and Educations) over the official legitimate sources, hence why nowadays i always take a grain of salt of information from every socmed posts and mass media press. (Something that i agree from your videos on the Other Side of The Truth).
My heart was sank when Parallax mentioned Vic Mignogna, he's one of my favorite VA because of his role as Junpei Iori from Persona 3 (Persona is a game series that not only memorable, but also life changing for me especially Persona 4.) but in the end we will always have a mistake and it's important to learn from our mistakes then reflecting to be a better person.
I will always remember what Parallax said on the video:
"Because manufacturing fake outrage always sells, that is the reality we live in and i'm afraid it's going stay this way for years to come."
Once again thank you Parallax and Cheecken for making this Video, it's quite an eye opener for me.
P.S: I'm actually want to share this video on X but i'm afraid to get banhammered by Elon.
Hi there! Co-writer of the video here, you basically got all the messages we were trying to send here, I don't think short videos are inherently wrong necessarily, you can cover something fairly in a shorter runtime, but of course when making these kinds of videos you have to make editorial judgements on what to leave out so you can keep the runtime to something reasonable, the shorter it gets the harder it becomes to stay fair and include all the needed context.
It's great that you related some of our political videos to this one, because yeah they do essentially have the same core message, which is that these issues whether it's politics, a culture war or whatever else, are not a football match, you don't pick a team and root for them no matter what. It's okay to have a tribe but you need to acknowledge the failings of that tribe otherwise not only do you become out of touch and lacking in credibility but you also make things worse off for yourself, you can't course correct if you refuse to acknowledge the problems, however painful that acknowledgement might be to make.
Mainstream outlets lie, alternative outlets lie, leftists lie, rightists lie, and they also all tell the truth, at different junctures and in different cases. Not all equally, some are more honest than others, but you should always be a sceptic and never take anyone's word for it unconditionally, we apply this to ourselves as well which is why these productions have our sourcing clearly shown, so when you hear something from us you can check the original research as well and judge for yourself if we were fair, we absolutely DON'T want you to take our word for it, trust us because we did our homework, not just because it's us!
As for sharing, feel free to, you're not gonna get banned by Elon, he mostly stuck to his pledge of free speech but his idea is you can say what you want but if you want anybody to see it you better pay that $8, "freedom of speech not freedom of reach", it's garbage but at least you won't be vaporised for posting our shit 😂
Thanks for deep diving into this issue. I'm so tried of this industry, i would never researched this that hard.
Let's hope more people watch this video.
This is the sad part: the research basically just took a day. Not even a day!
@@Cheecken Damn. but, still you did absolutely amazing research on the video.
@@noahfuelgaming8121 Thank you!
Hello there,
I'm one of those people who's followed the whole "Gamergate 2.0" thing for awhile now. I wouldn't call myself a Gamergater, but I still supported them up until now.
Anyways, I just wanted to say: Thanks for making this video man, I think you saved me from a whole lot of misery and anger lol. At first I thought this video would be the same thing, affirming the narrative held up by other people in Gamergate, but you've really helped me gain the independence needed break away from that thought process lol. I also really appreciated the nuance you guys brought to the table here. You didn't necessarily demonize anyone, but you were very fair/thorough in your analysis in the situation, so you didn't feel like you were biased to anyone when making this video. I wish we had more channels like this to help people break out of their "chains" I guess you could say. I appreciate you man.
Wow, thank you very much for the comment! I am very grateful to see that the design of the video structure, title and thumbnail actually worked in the way I intended. I am very happy to see that people can approach this video with an open mind and walk away from it having a positive impact. Thank you for making my day :)
Co-writer of the episode here, thank you so much for your response! You are pretty much the exact target audience we were going for. Me, Massi (Cheecken) and Parallax have each had our experiences with this triad of dodgy tribalist politics, culture war nonsense and conspiracy theories at different times, so naturally we don't want to do an "us" vs "them" type project because the "them" here is, well basically our past selves.
Well meaning people can fall into these traps of malicious propaganda just like we did so we try to do our part dismantling it all in one place, the evidence has always been out there but sadly it's often scattered and so takes way more effort to find, so although we do poke a lot of fun and use lots of insults it's much more an attack on ideas and behaviours than individual people, like theoretically if The Quartering woke up tomorrow, came to terms with just how much he sold his soul to the grift and started promoting a more honest and substantial message to his audience, I would praise him.
And I also would praise you very highly, it's hard to turn round and realise a part of your worldview or attitude is just completely full of shit, we put up defensive mechanisms to avoid this, you can see that in the reaction from some people who accused the whole video of being lies or a con job with no evidence, because even though what we presented is very backed up with sources it's too painful to acknowledge, so the reaction has to be "I don't know how, but it MUST be wrong", this was how I behaved for maybe my first 2 years of following politics/social issues, I wasn't perfect after that but I learnt over time to see less black and white, so genuinely it's a very strong thing to snap out of that, thank you for hearing us out and recognising that we have good faith intentions behind our work.
For me the trick was to simply stop trying to have an all encompassing ideology, I have principles, some of which I hold to very strongly but I don't have an ideology, an ideology is a framework for explaining every political or social issue, the problem with that is when you come across something that doesn't match the framework either it collapses or you have to start bending reality around it, the reaction of these right wing conservative ideologues as an example of this, they can't comprehend that SBI are not the sinister conspirators they're labelled as because their ideology pretty much is "conservatism is the new counter culture", if there's no liberal/woke/SJW/whatever else agenda infiltrating all corners of the media or society to struggle against that ideology loses merit. When you get rid of these grand narratives and all encompassing explanations suddenly grasping the world is way more manageable, because you're not relying on stereotypes, stereotypes don't survive contact with reality, at least not prolonged contact, unless you warp reality to force them to.
You're stupid. This is a psi op.
The Oblivion music bits are comedy gold. What a masterpiece!
unfortunately not many people will see this video sad
Sadly the price we pay for not following a narrative blindly!
I am convinced that most people talking about this topic don't even play videogames. Just to put out an example, a lot of these self-proclaimed 'gamers' threw an absolute fit about Alan Wake 2 and I'm pretty sure they don't even know why. It's not even that I personaly really enjoyed it, every single point mentioned about it is characterized in the complete opposite way it actually plays out in-game, even Saga being black is something that has a reason behind it (not that it needs it). One of the best and original games we've had in recent memory, and it's attatched to this absolutely exhausting and pointless shit flinging campaign.
Anyway, great video, wish that idea of getting the interviews with devs would've panned out but hey what can you do.
In a way it was a lost cause with the interviews from the beginning. In the end the Sweet Baby thing only breeds more distrust between a subset of consumers and the industry at large. Would you accept an interview when you fully know that malicious actors online are gonna twist every word you say? Well, likely not!
Also I think many people who end up subscribing to these ideas actually do game, but many of the people promoting the campaign may not. They definitely arent playing the games that are being criticized that is for sure!
Thanks for watching! :)
Hey, well done.
Nuance and honest, good faith analyses? Sign me up! 😊
Thank you kindly!
Thanks bro, happy you liked it!
The fact that you guys answer to every single comment with genuine interest/respect and by doing so clarify or even expand on some parts of your arguments stated in the video is nothing less than worthy of applause. Seriously. Absolutely blown away by A.) the video and B.) your management regarding comments/feedback/questions etc.
Greets from Berlin und ein schönes Wochenende euch!
Thanks for noticing! Funnily enough I almost never post comments on YT normally, I haven't done so in years, I think the only exception was when I responded to some comments on another video of ours, I think one of the ones discussing the Ukraine conflict.
It's kind of a 2 sided coin, part of it is about a good faith attempt to educate people and part of it is just a selfish feeling that I should just defend the points we made for defending them, because I strongly believe in them even though I know they won't reach everybody, and of course I also want to show appreciation for open minded and supportive people like yourself. Thanks again and greetings from London!
In germany we have a saying: "Rede und Antwort stehen."
And you guys do that. And that is probably even as important as the video itself. Selfish to a degree? Well... You gotta be. Nothing, absolutely NOTHING wrong with that as long as your coin keeps spinning in balance and won't end up with one side being on top and the other facing down, for noone to see anymore. And even if that happens... Go again. Spin it again and it may keep that balance even longer than before. Kinda like in Inception... or something... Ok, now I'm going places, Jeez.
But I DO like that metaphor XD
Just a quick question: NeverKnowsBest also made a video on this topic. As expected, it is quite well researched and in the end a lot of your arguments can be found in his video as well.
Do you consider to reach out to bigger youtubers like him? Joining forces on that matter could be a productive thing, don't you think? And maybe by doing so, the probability that you guys get a postive answer for an interview request might increase.
It's just something that came to my mind after I watched his video today.
Have a great start into the week.
Greets.
@@jedermann3649 Very true, it's fine for there to be an ego side to it as long as at the end of the day the motivations are pure, as for that other videomaker I haven't heard of him before, I'm not necessarily the person to ask in regards to collaborations as Massi tends to handle outreach for that, but I will pass this on to him.
Thanks again and likewise, hope you have a nice week as well!
I saw a link to this video in some shit flinging argument between strangers on Twitter, and I really appreciate the context you give behind this controversy. I think that about a decade ago, I wouldn't have participated in a harassment campaign or anything, but I probably would have taken some of these goons at their word regarding the motives behind Sweet Baby. I mean, as someone who's not in the industry, the idea of a consulting firm for video game narratives immediately sounds very cynical and potentially corrupt.
With a bit more of the context you've provided (and some that I can recall learning before), it sounds much more reasonable. Of course there are developers out there who would pay a third party to tell them how their dating sim's shitty exaggerated dialog could be improved, then just ignore the feedback. Of course there are teams that don't employ writers of their own, or that don't have time to focus on all the flavortext in the backgrounds of their games.
I have a friend who works at Infinity Ward who told me that they rely on contractors to make the UI in Call of Duty games. I figure with something that integral getting outsourced, anything is possible in the games industry. I guess a company like Sweet Baby is just filling a need. Some of it still sounds very cynical, but I can't hate a company for that notion alone.
It's very clear to me that the bastards making a big fuss about this company are full of hot air too. Even if Sweet Baby proved to be nothing more than an assembly line that turns corporate funds into diversity quota report cards, most of the people you mention here would have trouble forming a coherent argument against that. The shit flinging that I saw was entirely uncompelling, even before I actually learned what this company does. I hope that more people will be informed properly over time about what SBI actually does. The more genuine explanation seems really unsexy compared to the bullshit being spread around the internet, tho, so properly informing people is an uphill battle.
Criminally underrated. I don't even remember how but I'm glad I've found you
Good vid, just a shame that most of treactionary won't see this, and even so, the damage is already done. This is the reason why I distanced myself from the reactionary channels and even turned off all of my history. I just don't want need anymore of this negativity anymore.
1:10:28 POSTAL mentioned lets gooooo
Wow, this is an incredibly well made video. Your channel is massively underrated, keep up this quality and one of your videos will blow up, I’m certain of it.
I hope so too! Thanks a bunch for watching 😁
Nah, max retarded Marxtard shite.
As a right leaning guy this whole woke stuff never really made sense to me in games or movies because if swapping races of characters and adding lgbtq characters doesn't affect the games writting and story then whats the problem.
its about outrage culture, people want their dopamine to cycle to a breaking point so that it can provide extreme levels of ecstacy.
This is genuinely what I thought as well, like a recent example was the new Batman cartoon that gender swapped the Penguin and race swapped a few characters, I heard some complaints about it but my reaction was basically "yeah and?". Was the writing bad? No I don't think it was, I enjoyed the show!
Representation can add more angles to a story and maybe enable more people to relate to it on different levels, that's what it is at its best, sometimes it just doesn't really make a difference beyond cosmetics, the worst side is when it devolves into tokenism or crappy stereotypes, which SBI directly spoke against.
Respect to you for not getting sucked into the outrage culture of "your side", I wish more people would realise that just because someone's on your side of the compass doesn't mean their word is gospel or they have any clue what they're talking about.
terrific video, very well made and hits the core of the issue, being critical without being overly condescending and exposing the weakness of thinking in these extremist ways and how easily mislead you might be
Thank you so much for this, I’ve seen so many rage bait videos from grifters because of TH-cam recommending them to me. I came across a few videos from Nerdrotic a few months, with absolute crude thumbnails and him saying how woke is the main problem in modern movies such as the current MCU without much talk about the real flaws. I’m glad someone like you and Parallax are calling out their scummy practices, but Cheecken if you are reading this, could you ask Parallax to provide some more evidence about Vic Mignogna in the replies of this comment? I remember when he first got MeTooed, I never really followed the anime community but on the surface it seemed like all his colleagues betrayed him including Sean Schemmel which really made me sad cause I love him as Goku.
The whole, "Suicide Squad game is w0kE! OMG!" nonsense never made any sense to me. How is someone getting shot in the head, and another guy getting pissed on by a bad guy, "woke?" That's the most un-woke crap I've ever heard. I'll admit I've never played the game and have no interest in doing so, though. Also, I appreciated your captions over the Hero Hei bit. Expected CC to render whatever he was talking about and wound-up reading about French food. Subscription for subverted expectations.
It's woke because it's retarded.
@@randomname9502 then the word woke lost it meaning
Yo preciate using my song for the vid outro
Never followed any of this sweet baby inc shenanigans that people were saying, but in general could tell that many CCs were "against" them in a way
I may be biased and misinformed here as i didnt really watch other perspectives, nor did i fact check the information in this video (i really could not be bothered about video game company drama, just let me play my shit) but at face value, this video seems really well researched and it addresses and counters the narrative these CCs are trying to push really well, so genuinely, props to you on getting me hooked about a topic i didnt really give a fuck about for close to 2 hours
20:35 The context behind SBI's "infamous" speech
i think my issue with the talk about the two black characters just chatting, no tokenism or something (53:07) didn't work for me as an argument because this wasn't two characters who were black and chose not to talk about this, but it was an Npc talking with the Custom player character.
In all games i've played, Npcs react to quite a lot of things about the player, usually gender, class, and if fantasy, whenever the player is a human, orc, or whatever. but skincolor never plays a role in dialouge with Custom player characters. there is no "flag" for skincolor, where this or that dialogue plays if they have a certain level of melanin. i see what kim is saying, it's nice to have two people of a certain group talk about something that doesn't relate to their skincolor or tokenism. but what she liked in that scene was just... how to call it... its the typical custom character situation.
i could runaround in rainbow-pimp gear, with a face only a mother could love, and they'd still act like i was normal human being. despite how out of scene i look.
but then again, my issue just is, i want Npc's to react to my character, if i look ridiculous i want them to comment on it. just like we as humans tend to do if we see something that draws attention.
Funnily enough, Kim actually mentioned this "custom character syndrome"!
If you watch from this point on here: th-cam.com/video/GfMsxjWgUbI/w-d-xo.html
she elaborates further. Thank you for watching :)
Belair's talk is boring, a bit self-congratulatory, and occasionally over-simplistic (ie the erasure of non-women abuse survivors)... Because it's a GDC talk by someone with a degree in advertising. There is a 100% it was going to be boring, self-congratulatory, and over-simplistic. I'm thankful you watched it so I don't have to!
Having a cringy name like "Sweet Baby" or being mildly offensive or embarassing isn't a hatecrime against gamers. It was a thinly-veiled excuse to campaign against people of colour for the crime of their white co-worker over-reacting.
GG would be a great choice for a deep dive, if any of the writers felt up to it. Turned out it was planned out, practically choreographed, over the course of many threads on /pol/. I was on 4chan at the time (and staunchly non-partisan at first), but I only found out when Ian Danskin made the timeline video. Blew my mind to realise it was SO astroturfed.
So, what do you think of dustborn? Especially about that song
So I guess the TL;DR of this is that there were communication problems and a pointless conflict, and pointing the problems of things to a singular entity is silly, when it's the entirety of the system or there are other factors playing, honestly I only vaguely knew about this problem and it seems to have lost relevancy at this point, so probably either side made it seem bigger than it actually was. Good job, nonetheless.
I hear that SimCity OST there, excellent choice 😌👌
Such an excellent soundtrack! Hard not to use it 😊
Absolutely fantastic video both of you. Hitting the goddamn nail on the head and a breath of fresh air. Easy subs for both of ya.
Hey thank you so much! I will relay the message :)
Wake up babe! New 142 min Cheecken vid just dropped! 🗣🗣🗣
Tbh I wasn't very interested in this topic. I saw one video before by someone neutral and didn't even finish that. Because the main problem, in the eyes of Kabrutus and others, is that SBI is ruining games. This is such a silly notion to me because one small company couldn't possibly ruin an entire medium, especially now that anyone can make a game with little to no budget. Sure, they could ruin SOME games, but what happened to "voting with your wallet" which is a phrase repeatedly uttered by these right-wingers? I don't care about some new games being bad, I just won't play them. I'm attached to the games I already love, not some projected idea of a video game that hasn't come out yet. For example, despite being a huge fan of Diablo 1 and 2, I've been boycotting Diablo 4 and the remake of 2. I only played Diablo 3 for like 2 hours because they made a trial version, but I never purchased it because I didn't wanna buy a stillborn game.
Speaking of which, you mentioned at some point in the video companies enforcing online-only mode in single-player games. I think I found your channel originally from your video on Unreal Tournament, which is another such game. Have you seen Ross Scott's (Accursed Farms') video on trying to stop this practice? I'm just tryna spread the word.
That being said, this is a fascinating case about how modern media operates. I'm glad you shone some light on it because now I'll know which of these influencers to avoid in the case I run into their stuff. Also, I applaud you guys for not taking sides, and rightfully condemning SBI for the way they (or their employees) have been handling the situation. Trying to shut down a Steam curator list is effed up.
Also, just wondering, did Kabrutus share your video on his Twitter like he promised?
Im very well aware of Ross Scott's efforts! I am a big supporter of his ideas on how the industry could improve in relation to these online only systems. Ideally singleplayer games shouldn't be arbitrarily connected to a server, and MMOs or other online games you buy should have some kind of end of life plan. It may be inconvenient to the developers, but we need it, not just to have a product keep working past it's planned lifecycle, but also to preserve our culture. We preserve Silver Halide film, but we don't do the same with videogames? That is just plain fucked!
Regarding modern media, I do believe that in many cases (assuming you give a shit about all this) deciding to buy a certain game, watch a certain video or have a certain opinion just boils down to a partisan decision. So for instance if you decide for yourself that Stellar Blade looks a bit silly and you don't want to buy it, people on the anti DEI side may think you might support the "uglification of women" in the medium, or if you think that a game really is pushing it with its political messaging, you may be seen as an ally of the boycotters. It shouldn't be this way! And this is where being honest about what happened comes in: We didn't make it a secret who we are more sympathetic to in this case, however Kindred DID kick the hornets nest. If we just glossed over that, it would have just dragged the entire message of the production down.
After having made this video and being reintroduced into the world of culture wars and meaningless back and forths, I legit believe that the only way to win in a "culture war" is not to participate in the first place. Just play the games you find interesting and dont play the ones that dont appeal to you, that is how you won't turn into a miserable wreck lol.
Kabrutus didn't share the video, however when I messaged him back then I didn't know how critical the video would become of him and his cause. I reached out to him again and was transparent about the video being quite critical of the cause, and he told me he would check it out, however I am not putting many chips on him actually sharing the video. We were friendly in our exchange on Twitter, but I do think that Kabrutus expected this video to be in support of his cause.
Ok, here are my 2 cents. While SBI has good intentions, its executions can be a hit or miss.
Race swapping to me is just not creative enough and a bit lazy, should've made a new character instead. But GOW Ragnarok is one of the times where I didn't really mind since the games, even before the recent ones, have a history of taking liberties in its mythologies. (While somehow making Thor accurate to the mythology)
Not related to race swapping, in FF7 Rebirth, there are areas where the locals can be considered diverse, one race in one area at a time. It would be nice, if it weren't for the fact that that even in yhe original game, it has diversity, and it's much better since it's on the multicultural side. Maybe they (Square or SBI )didn't notice it.
I got the FF7 information from Think Before You Sleep of all places. You should watch his video on SBI, and take the parts where you would initially agree.
That video would be good if it weren't for some hypocritical aspects like downgrading the main character by calling him something akin to a beta male while praising the games black character and the last third of the video. His community post about the game is much worse, to the point I realized he has skill issues in it's combat and wanting it to be like dark souls.
Hah! I just gave someone a rabbit hole to uncover which leads to other rabbit holes. You're welcome @Cheecken and @ParallaxMY .
Besides Think Before You Sleep is his "girlfriend", Brittany Venti, who is well known for being a long time grifter of maybe 8 plus years, with some very out of touch takes like saying that people who simp for their Vtubers are actually simping for the CEO of the company said Vtubers are in, when it's a well known fact that the CEO is best girl. Even the grifters that are in this video like Hero Hei and Rev Says Desu think she is dumb.
Hah! Now I have told you about Vtubers so you will enter this rabbit hole, and you have no choice but to join.
Also, play a real Shin Megoomi Tensay game. It's not a suggestion, it's an order. Thank you for taking my 2 cents.
That's your mistake, you watched Think Before Your Sleep, a rising channel that panders to the incel narrative.
@@MatPost Yes good sir , I watched TBYS and it was a mistake. Thankfully I felt something was off and decided to do what he "advocated" for which is research. As of right now, I wouldn't say he is actually rising. More like getting community noted for blatant misinformation on anime of all things. Other discoveries include:
1. Ex Brittany Venti having the cursed Sonichu pendant, which is a whole different rabbit hole that I hoped you didn't follow, even if there's a chance that you knew already.
2. TBYS deleting old content which includes criticizing his future ex when he started dating her and crawling back to said content when his break up is announced.
3. Brittany cheating TBYS with one of her exes last year and is rumored to be currently living with said ex.
hey whats the music you used in the start of the video i am currently trying to look for it
Its listed in the Source credits at the very top! Manhunt 2 - Trust, Duty, Love
@@Cheecken thank you
Grifting and fascism, are two words I have been hearing constantly in the 2020s. I am going to be honest here, I keep hearing those 2 words and to be honest, they have lost their meaning to me. Anybody can call someone a fascist or a grifter and they don't add proof or they have proof, yet there are holes in the arguments or past history that has been revealed which reveals them as a hypocrite or a monster. I do appreciate the content so far, and I believe you do deserve more subscribers and support. Information such as this is great to inform the pubic of what's going on. As for the reactionary youtubers, I will say they are just letting people like us about what's going on. Will it cause backlash and prove the point of the other side right? Yes it will. That is the consequence of reporting on such topics. There will always be the cause and effect scenario. Also, I believe in the quote which I will stick by ; "I will vote with my wallet when it comes with video games". If it looks good and i see the gameplay of it on TH-cam, then I will buy it. In conclusion, good video, and I hope you will get more subscribers and create content, which will make inform the people of controversial topics.
Thanks for the compliments, just wanted to clear up a few things.
For the record, we didn't call anyone a Fascist in this video for the very reason you outlined, the term Fascism has been diluted by being used too broadly, it's a very specific ideology with specific tenets, people like The Quartering might be right wing reactionaries but that doesn't mean they're Fascists, we called them what they were which is right wing conservatives.
As for the grifting, we called these people grifters because it was abundantly clear that's what they are, we didn't want to toss that word around like a buzzword, they're not just raising awareness from their side of the political spectrum they are lying to people and misleading them, that's what we focused on and we showed numerous examples of it, maybe you were just making a general complaint about people misusing terms and it so that's fair enough, but that's not what we were doing for sure, we backed up all the claims we made and wouldn't have made them otherwise, calling them grifters is a totally fair characterisation, as just another example beyond what was shown in the video I recently read about how The Quartering claimed to have created his own coffee brand when it was in fact just a relabel of another company, a company that happened to be very "woke" in their social attitudes: www.reddit.com/r/TheQuarteringIsANazi/comments/wq9wpp/if_you_are_a_quartering_fan_here_from_jeremys/
So although I'm sure there's genuine political motivation from these people, they're also making easy money of off peddling sensationalised garbage, I would certainly call that grifting.
As for voting with your wallet, you're more than entitled to do that although creating meaningful change through boycotts is usually very difficult, all I would say is please be an informed voter!
@@elwood6841 Thank you for the response and for the information that you have provided to me in the replies. Let me clarify the 2 words that I have used in my comment. Those 2 words are from the gaming communities that i have been in and have left due to the toxicity. Political beliefs have been infecting gaming communities and I keep hearing those 2 terms being constantly used. During your video, I was reminded of those 2 terms and commented. Again, thank you and I wish you the best of luck. 👍
This is a masterclass in gaslighting and complete bullshit.
I agree. The outrage towards Sweet Baby Inc (and in particular, towards Kim Belair) is absolutely bullshit. None of what the reactionaries said about Kim Belair are remotely true (Kim's out-of-context "terrify them" clip on Twitter is one example), and this video went above and beyond demonstrating how and why that is. We all got gaslit into believing the lies perpetuated by the likes of ItsAGundam and Rev Says Desu, and they went to town guilt-tripping all of us into caring for these things for the "sanctity" of our favorite games and movies.
Reactionaries thrive on ignorance. That's why you'll always see them whipping up culture war videos three times a day so that people can get outraged over them. It pays a lot to lie, and they'll keep doing it so long as they have the monetary incentive to do so.
What is bullshit? Lemme know. Dont just say its bullshit, call it out!
Nailed it. Only real talk in these her commie comments.
yep... total marxtard shite.
@@ParallaxMY Retarded Marxist Copium.
As of 14 minutes in:
My experience has been that many of the people looking to avoid games that have SBI and similar involved find the correspondence between poor quality and especially ideologically motivated design to be overwhelming. If you look into the videos of numerous people who are speaking extensively on the topic, you'll find that they acknowledge that the game studios themselves are also responsible
23 minutes:
Is there something inherently wrong with people objecting to Belair pushing for major established series to shift focus in demographic targeting? Presumably these people have been satisfied with the past properties they bought and encouraged the studio economically to make more of the series, so is it improper for them to expect a shift like this to change the game experience?
31 minutes:
This is where it's important to understand that there are people who are participating in the ongoing debate who dislike ideologically motivated design. Not merely left-leaning design or right-leaning design, but *_any_* ideologically motivated design. A game having in-world politics is very different from a game being made to communicate a message about real-world politics
42 minutes:
Belair mentions that there's a conception that white men enjoy diverse genres and environments when (seemingly implying only when) there is a human male white representative in game (presumably the player character). From where does this assumption originate and is it even coherent to react to, given that a large number of successful games (and indeed, full franchises) from each of the past 5 decades have not contained any such representation? There's ample evidence that in the western world, the demographics of gamers expanded fairly slowly until about 2010 with the mobile revolution. I think it's easy to look at this and conclude that the conception presented is incorrect as well as a motivated presentation of the state of the gaming industry.
47 minutes:
I think there is no issue in criticizing the presented work of SBI regarding the dialogue modification for the unnamed dating sim. If people want to say that they find the motivations or outcomes to be contributing to a poor quality game, then they are perfectly free to. Alternatively, pointing games that do this out so that other people may know to form an opinion on the product they are potentially looking to buy is also something people are entirely free to do.
51 minutes:
Belair appears to suggest that a stereotypically French character is somehow unpreferable in the game. If there is a market for a game showing such a stereotypical character, why ought the studio not follow the creative vision that includes it? This is another example of public critique of Belair's ideas
53 minutes:
This again goes to the crux of player character as representative. Belair's experience of Mass Effect is not universal, not even applicable to another non-white person playing the same game in the same way. Her experience, as each player's experience is, was unique. A type of ideologically motivated design is having a character who is not a person themselves, but a stand in for a group. This is, as a critical gamer would put it, bad storytelling. I cannot know for sure, but I think this is what a number of people who would respond to this clip of Belair's experience as "that's a you problem" mean.
I believe that that conflict with Kindred and the Streisand Effect of it is still that main driver of interest for this issue, if not necessarily focused on Kindred himself anymore. The ongoing opinion tweets of gaming journalists, developers and community managers are keeping the outrage that someone would be gone after for making a Steam curator list fresh. I think if that portion of the debate settled, we'd likely see grifters lose the ability to wave around this topic as a signboard for attention and money. Overall not a bad video, but one that I think a lot of people might call lopsided
Hi there! Co-writer for this video, wanted to reply to some of the points you made
- We know that detractors of SBI also acknowledge other factors, we in fact made a point of including this, our clip of Kabrutus on Suicide Squad includes the part where he says the game still would've been poor quality even without SBI's involvement, and we mentioned that after, what we were criticising is people blaming SBI for issues when they have no evidence SBI was responsible for them, sometimes when there is evidence showing they were not, like developers who rejected claims SBI were responsible for Suicide Squad's various controversial decisions, or Saga Anderson's ethnicity, the problem with this kind of pattern recognition is if it's just a feeling rather than based on clear evidence you are at risk of getting it wrong, and there were several cases where SBI's critics definitely did
- There's no problem with disagreeing with Kim's point on target demographics, if you're happy with how games are and the audiences they have that's fine, she feels there are more stories to tell and people of any demographic would enjoy that, I would agree with her, but if you don't then there's nothing wrong with that, our point with showing the talk was not to argue for every opinion she has but to show how her words had been taken out of context and made to appear more malicious than they were.
- As for people who dislike ideological motivation, yes, I'm sure there are people who really do just want apolitical games and that's fine, lots of the games we play are apolitical, I've been playing DOOM 64 lately and there's no ideology behind it, it's a game about shooting monsters in the face with a Chaingun, I like games with a message too but you certainly don't need to have a political point with every bit of media you make or consume, despite being someone very interested in politics I also like a break from it as well just like anyone else. Our point wasn't that "I don't want politics in my games" is a problematic idea, it was that a lot of the people saying this were disingenuous, someone like The Quartering spends his entire day talking about politics, his entire social media platform is dedicated to it, when he's saying he's tired of politics he's being very disingenuous, our problem was with hypocrisy.
- Yes, it's obviously fine to disagree with Kim's suggestion on the dating sim dialogue, although I liked the implications of the suggestion I can think of totally reasonable reasons why a dev would not want to use it, she was suggesting the dialogue tree should be expanded to have more detailed options, if the designers just wanted this to be a simple set of options and didn't want to go beyond that it would make sense for them to not want to implement her idea. The reason we brought this example up was to show that Kim's ideal approach is additive, rather than simply wanting to remove, censor or sanitise things, again showing how we think she's been mischaracterised, most critics of SBI never criticised the dialogue example because they never used a clip of it in their attacks on SBI, very few of them seemed to use anything from the talk beyond the "terrify them" clip, so we weren't defending that dialogue example from criticism, because there wasn't any, we were using it to show KIm's attitude, which we felt is more reasonable than certain ideologues have portrayed.
- The reason the stereotypical French character was unpreferable to Kim is that the character was added specifically for diversity/representation purposes, as Kim mentioned in the talk, so the reason she was annoyed was the company was claiming to work on representation and then their representation was a typical stereotype. Also, the studio is of course entitled to follow whatever markets they desire, it's their choice, it was also their choice to take an interest in representation, presumably there are audiences interested in that too, Kim wouldn't have been talking about this if the company wasn't interested because the studios hire SBI, not the other way around.
- Kim's experience with Mass Effect actually goes against your implication that her ideals are "ideologically motivated" and "a stand in for a group", which is why we pointed it out, the reason she praised Jacob as a character was actually that he didn't conform to any particular archetype, in other words that there was no agenda or group stereotype behind him, I haven't played Mass Effect 2 so I don't know if Jacob is well written or not, but that's not really what I was interested in, what I was interested in was that her ideals seemed to be very different to how her critics were portraying them, this example of what she thought good representation looked like was a demonstration of that, Kim is well aware her experience is not universal, she in fact argued that it doesn't need to be, she argued in the talk that she feels white audiences can relate to black characters just like she as a black person could relate to white characters like Nathan Drake, I doubt her life has much in common with Nathan Drake's at all but she still loved that game!
I don't agree that Kindred or the Streisand Effect are the main factors anymore, simply because as you said most people are not talking about Kindred anymore, the complaints, fair or not, are now about SBI's role in the industry and the culture they promote, but yes the refusal of some figures an outlets to acknowledge Kindred's actions has done damage as we pointed out in the video, we pointed out that PC Gamer refused to call Kindred's attempted harassment campaign a harassment campaign even though that's blatantly what it was, and PC Gamer were far from the only ones, that has damaged their credibility and pushed people following this towards more biased grifter voices, would those people have listened to these more mainstream outlets if they had portrayed what Kindred did honestly? Maybe, maybe not, but regardless they should've done so, simply because we believe in the truth, Kindred did instigate harassment, so to talk about the origins of this drama without mentioning that is very dishonest, we're against that.
I appreciate that you gave detailed reasons for your criticisms and were overall complimentary, but I think your perception that we were lopsided has come from a misunderstanding of our motives with some points, hopefully this clears some of that up, in a way calling us "lopsided" is fair because the work is obviously opinionated, we didn't try to be neutral nor did we imply that we were, we just call an issue how we see it, if in a dispute that means one side is 50% correct and the other is also 50% that's how we'll show it, if it's 60/40 then we show 60/40, 90/10 then we show 90/10, et cetera, that will obviously annoy fans of the side we saw as 10% right but that's something we're willing to accept, we're not going to change the framing of the video just to appease potential viewers, we're going to say what to the best of our ability we found to be true.
Thank you for your feedback, even though I think your criticism was misguided it's always important to receive criticism rather than being in an echo chamber, I'd be interested to know what you think of some of these responses!
On one hand I love to see that the big boys are getting called out on their BS, on the other I am concerned that out of some stream of coincidences (like this video exploding, 2hour or so long videos tend to do that) you might get torched in reutrn.
Edit. 41:13 this sounds familiar
We are ready for the argument, you don't make opinionated videos like this without expecting some pushback!
@@elwood6841
One of my favorite youtubers LazerPig, made a video that blew up much more than he would have liked. That video had factual flaws in them and people jumped in to make r*action videos.
When LP watched those videos he was shovked at how a reaction video where RedEffect strawmaned him for 30 minutes managed to convince about half a million people that LP was wrong about almost everything, meanwhile many corrections in RedEffects video were straight up wrong.
Be preppared for bullshit, and be preppared that people will deffend that bullshit because it came out of their favourites youtubers ass.
@@MrFi-es2ie Again, we are prepared, of course our feedback is smaller scale because the channel is just quite small, but we are used to people misunderstanding us, ignoring the points we made, or just rolling with the worst faith interpretation of us because they didn't like what we had to say, I try to reach a broad audience and change minds rationally but I'm also well aware that some people won't listen to reason, if someone wants to come in being stupid and refusing to listen then that's their problem at the end of the day
Amazing video, congrats!
Thank you very much!
Dude... ¡DUUUUUDE! Your concept is just the one I want to portrait myself... ¿Mind If use your research as source for a vid in spanish?
Oh sorry I completely overlooked your comment before! Sure as long as you dont reupload the entire video and give credit you can reference it and use portions of it in your video :)
@@Cheecken you’re pure gold, m8
Ooohohoho. This is going to be good…
great video!
war never changes
Nice try, pulling a fast one on everyone.
I don't think that's true. I certainly wasn't fast enough to pull back from your mom when I climaxed, and now she's five months pregnant with my baby. You should come visit your new sibling sometime.
As a gamer, I prefer sterile environments to enjoy the actual gameplay. I don't want to relate to anything happening, I want to explore the ideas it presents in great detail. Some stories go into great detail, and those are commendable, but it has no player control, or room for imagination directly (not a rule). I often find a varied cast to be fun, since it breeds a lively environment that doesn't have any narrow or isolated aspect that says, "These are the heros you are looking for." But also, highlights the human element (regardless of skin color), so seeing SBI draw a baseline in an industry that is lacking in many ways appears to be a good thing for a few reasons. Some issues in gaming (in general) I've noticed..
Stories are replications of their themes without any detail of their own, making them loathsome to go through in tandem with the gameplay. Characters provide a means to an end, they have no life or meaning apart from the theme/story's desire to crscendo or finalize, discarding the dynamics of each character to that enclosed perspective (many games I see from the onset doing this, or even shoving it in my face with an introduction cutscene, knowing full well every character I will meet is predestined to a selfish story). Minutiea often doesn't reflect the game at all (every concept is a blurb having no tangential relations to the game or it's story, and is a completely different exoerience. in other words, a bunch of one liners that don't fit).. which also makes another point of confliction with a game's self, giving it more of an identity crisis.
Games and their story elements don't belong with the gameplay, unless the two are made inseperable. The modular design of story content often harshly removes any interest for me, but also makes it difficult to see cohesion irregardless if there is or isn't any (because the player experience will not match the developer's intent unless it strives for that direct line).
I hope they can understa d the majority of these grievances people have still have an underlining issue, in that the games themselves are divisive in their product makeup, which will still provide a noticeable contrast (the one being misinterpreted by angry geeks in Suicide Squad's case).
art has always derived inspiration from real world politics to make those who interact with it reflect upon the reality that they lived in with a better perspective. what you're describing here is about wanting to justify mindless consuming by degrading art to nothing more than mere aesthetics, which is asinine to the highest degree. grow a spine.
Griffin Gaming mentioned in one of his videos that companies hire SBI for ESG which it's not always SBI's fault.
We heard of this narrative about ESG scores but never saw any evidence of SBI being hired by a company because of this, it's just an accusation and we prefer facts to vibes
@@elwood6841Got it
Environmental, Social and Governance? Seriously?? This is the business equivalent of saying you do charity work in your dating profile to look like a nice guy. If this is what you're worried about, SBI is small potatoes. What a joke.
**SNORES***
Be careful, a suspicious hotdog will fly into your mouth when you least expect it.
the Game Suicide Squad always seemed logical to me, it's a game that tries to show the less pretty side of things. While the game doesn't look interesting, and I've never read or have been made known to that game's story before, I still haven't seen anything that comes close to showing any wrongdoing, or at least not directly, because there are vacuum chambers of brainwashers yelling and screaming about it without any analysis. The SBI employee seemed justified initially especially when you consider each perspective.
Unless this is writing off the killed characters for good, I don't know why people would be upset.
If by the SBI employee you mean Kindred, no I don't agree with that, responding to the SBI Detected group with a harassment campaign wasn't justified at all, Kabrutus had in fact specifically told people not to harass anyone, although some might have done that anyway and we think the guy doesn't really know what he's talking about he doesn't deserve his account banned, which would permanently lock him out of hundreds of games he paid for fair and square.
If by the employee you meant Kim though, yes we would absolutely agree!
But yes the Suicide Squad issue is a farce, there's no evidence SBI was responsible for the problems people had with that story, if anything quite the opposite, from what I've seen of it there are legitimate criticisms about the game, it seems to follow on from the Arkham series but have almost nothing to do with it stylistically and takes a lot of liberties with the storyline but I haven't played the game so it wouldn't be fair of me to judge.
The complaint about Batman not having a heroic death I also found to be a bit ridiculous, I'm a big fan of Batman and have been ever since I was a kid but I don't think he always needs to come out on top or have "dignity", there are some people who would be angry of showed Batman losing a fight against God himself because they're just that into the fanboyism and I think it's kind of childish.
@@elwood6841 For sure, everyone expects things to be dramatic, but I never really understood that perspective (or will take non dramatic things and make them so). Also I meant before the attacks on the steam curator page, seeing how aggressive people on the internet can be in light of someone else's work never seems fair or fun. Despite all of the haters anti-marketing the game, I am curious if any of them actually played it, or if those people are just so accustomed to expressing hatred that it's just a natural part of their day. Whatever the case is, it's sad to see a singleplayer game reduced to an online service that'll get forgotten in less time than the drummed up controversy.
@@e3.14c4 I imagine most of them didn't play Suicide Squad but I don't blame them for that, you can judge the story without playing it I suppose if you watch a cutscene compliation, although it would feel different of course, but the game from most accounts seems to just be a bit crap 😂
I think it's fine to judge others works harshly if that's how you feel, but knowing what you're talking about would be a good start point beforehand
One thing I feel is missing from this was the fact that a good few AAA games were made, and flopped, pdq due to their DEI et all bs long before anyone even heard about SBI's involvement in their making. The only way we are going to stop this DEI invasion in both our games and movies is to show it with our wallets. I for one applaud the Steam list and just wish it had been a thing before I had wasted my money on a few of my games :/
The problem we had with the Steam list is that all it is is a list of games SBI worked on in any capacity, if you just hate them as a company so much that you don't want to play anything they touched then fair enough it's a good resource, but if your concern is what attitudes a game promotes or is influenced by we know that SBI's influence on that varies from project to project and that's because ultimately they only have as much power as the companies they're hired by give them, that might be full editor's rights or nothing at all.
I agree with you. In my view Sweet Baby Inc is a symptom of a much larger problem within the gaming and overall media industry. The video isn’t bad, but I’ll be real with you. One of the most concerning things that’s been revealed by this whole controversy is just how willing these people are in making it an echo chamber. I believe there was a person affiliated with the company posting on X about how they will literally tell all the companies and people they work with to NEVER collaborate or do business with those connected/supporting the sweet baby Inc detected community. Which is kind of concerning since No. 1, SBI has an exceptional amount of connections to the AAA gaming scene (hell, even the fucking indie scene has some interesting connections with them, like Ko-op for example) but even then it’s really obvious what that would mean as a threat. Practically nobody would work with you in the entire industry. Which is fucking crazy for anyone to even vaguely threaten that, let alone flat outright say it. The thing that really makes SBI a difficult company to gauge concerning its influence on the gaming industry is the fact that it doesn’t just influence the scriptwriting, but narrative development as well. Which might not seem like a big difference, but it is fairly substantial when put into context. (Narrative writing is giving the story a theme, an overarching plot, an overall act structure and more) scriptwriting is what you do to actually fulfill the very narrative that you crafted (I.E the specifics of what was already predefined/laid out for the story, and simply creating the dialogue and more for it to occur). Combine that with the fact that SBI has so many connections (at least on paper) and it makes you wonder just how they created those connections in the first place. Personally, when I heard about some of them creating a “safe discord” to discuss how to deal with the whole SBI detected situation it kind of made me realize just how close some of these devs might be. Which isn’t an inherently bad thing, but it makes you wonder just how much stuff happens behind the scenes without anyone ever even realizing.
@@Nairobin Well yes a lot of these corporate structures are not very transparent and SBI actually has suffered for this as it gives their detractors a window to project whatever image they want, but as we said in the video in the few examples where specific claims were made they were either demonstrably false or denied by developers involved, including public statements and what we heard privately as seen in the example at the end
So yes there's a lot we don't know and that's a problem, these economic structures should be far more transparent, but when we don't have the evidence we're not going to just take that vacuum filling image from conservative ideologues at face value, that doesn't mean you should like SBI but just acknowledge that there are gaps instead of trying to plug them with unverifiable claims
As for that "safe discord", it's good you mentioned it's not inherently bad, personally I would put into the context of just how vicious this conversation has quickly gotten and its disregard for nuance or facts, these developers are being barraged with shit by people who aren't well meaning and don't know what they're talking about, if you're just a regular dev and not a pr person you probably don't have the energy or the skill to deal with such a storm
As for that affiliate making threats, I think I saw this at some point but I don't remember the details, if you happen to come across them feel free to send them and I could address it, but of course we don't believe in cancel culture, trying to harass people or screw them over for having an opinion even if it's a stupid one is absurd, like trying to get Kabrutus' account banned which would lose all of his games that he spent a lot of money on, I don't agree with him on pretty much anything he said but I think taking all that stuff away from him is very disproportionate
That said it depends on what the "cancellation" is for, "cancelling" by bombarding someone with harassment for having a dissenting opinion is dangerous for discussion and in general just an unhealthy environment to foster, but other times people have been "cancelled" by being called out for genuine malicious behaviour, there's a difference that has to be made there, there's disproportionate harassment and then there's being called out for being a prick
mmm i can almost taste the effort and quality😛👍.
If your answer to "there's a reason the story blew up the way it did" is not "they tried to get a guy's steam taken down for showing what games they worked on," then you're as bad as the mainstream journalists who always leave that detail out of their reporting (another reason it blew up). It doesn't really matter what SBI was doing at this point, the reason it blew up is their reaction to people saying what they work on + the media's reaction to that.
Are you scared that there is nuance to this whole fiasco? Also your wrong that’s not why it blew up
@@chaserseven2886Nuamce these balls.
@@chaserseven2886Nuance these balls.
I kind of agree with you on this. I’ll be real with you here, Sweet Baby Incs fall from grace was a LONG time coming and I’m happy to see it happen. But it’s also important to see these things with as much detail and overall understanding as possible.
@@GodEmperorSenpailol
Yet another video misrepresenting the outcry against sweet baby inc, I agree that it was a scapegoat and agree with most of your factual points about the situation but this video ultimately did the same thing towards the outcry against companies like sweet baby inc that the lazy content farmers did toward the company. The outcry was in general against firms that are used to consult in on game writing in general, especially those that espouse liberal view points and view DEI as necessary for all media due to how they can inject such things into games, of course the developers would also be at fault but theres not much the public can do to show displeasure at this than boycott sweet baby inc, they have already admitted to this themselves, many of the accusations against them while not known to be factual are easily accepted simply because of the type of work they do and their ideological leanings. I understand why you included some of these sections in your video, condemning content farms is very good, but the way it was presented also made it seem as if there was no reason for all of this to happen in the first place and sweet baby inc couldn't have done anything for people to condemn them when that simply isn't true, in fact the entire reason it blew up was from the streisand effect of trying to take down a steam group that only categorizes the games they've worked on and nothing more. It made them seem desperate and guilty as all hell of the things people accused them of off hand (whether true or not).
To top this off the process she was explaining in that conference is very much the nature of liberal writing in general, increasing output of ideology or inclusion or DEI within the work until the primary audience simply accepts and likes any game marketed toward them regardless of anything, in fact Hollywood and most media do the same thing as products and people are absolutely tired of it, the fact a company's entire job subsists off of similar work ticks people off understandably.
Dude, we literally mentioned the streisand effect and what Chris Kindred did in the video multiple times, at the beginning and the end, we explicitly said that Kindred had created much of the mess SBI is in by trying to launch a cancel campaign that backfired dramatically, that SBI didn't help themselves by not condemning this behaviour, and that the mainstream press were shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring this and not calling a spade a spade in regards to what Kindred did, the things you are saying we didn't talk about are in the video, we did not make it seem like the backlash came out of nowhere, we spent the whole introduction talking about what sparked it, if you missed that that's on you
We also talked about consulting more broadly as well and why it might and might not be liked or welcome, and what SBI are actually about, if you listen to how we explained Kim Belair's arguments and you still don't agree with them then that's fine, you aren't who we were criticising, we were criticising the people who blatantly lied about what she had to say and fed the worst faith interpretation of her remarks they could possibly drum up, when we heard what Kim's idea of DEI is we found ourselves sympathetic to it and made no secret of that in the video, so that's why we didn't represent it as a bad thing, but if you don't like it that's fine, we can disagree on the interpretations, just not the facts
Also, if the accusations against them are being accepted because of their ideological leanings even if there's no proof for them (or they're proven to be false), that's a big problem, even if you hate someone or their ideas, it's not good to tell blatant lies about them, warping your own understanding of the issue and others, this is again a point we made in the video
So I don't mean to be harsh but your criticisms don't really make any sense, they're based on the idea that we ignored a bunch of points that we went out of our way to bring up, if we made a point of including these issues and you're still going to complain that we ignored that side of things I don't know what more we can do for you, sorry
@@elwood6841 You did bring up most of the points but only in an off hand way as if sweet baby inc had no real reason to be persecuted, in fact you brought up Kim's terrible presentation on marketing and tried to defend the very things that people disagree with her and the company about, you did a very good job with presenting facts its simply the opinions themselves that I and many others disagree with.
The sympathy for sweet baby inc is understandable considering all the shitty content farms but this company is very much emblematic of the troubles people have with gaming in general, in point of fact the defense of "politicizing" video games, your counterpoints to these terrible youtubers were well done however it goes far outside of the scope of the video.
This part can be taken as a strawman of the reason people are done with many modern games by using some off-hand comments made by a couple of idiots online who don't know how to express their reasoning, I enjoyed the research, but defending Kim's points was something I very much stand against (outside of intellectual exercise) and regardless of their capacity of work in a game I feel the company should be boycotted.
@@MontySlython We absolutely didn't present these things in an offhand way, I'm just going to quote straight from the script:
"The boycott community got a massive boost after certain SBI employees tried to instigate a harassment campaign against the group, encouraging their followers to mass report the group and Kabrutus personally to Valve, hoping that they would get banned from the Steam platform.
This backfired massively, as commentators picked up on the story masses of people joined up to the group and began to speak against Sweet Baby, Valve confirmed the group and its founder were going nowhere, the employees and Sweet Baby ended up having to private their accounts instead to avoid the backlash, and the main instigator of the harassment ended up getting suspended by Twitter for breaking the rules.
It was a classic case of the Streisand Effect, rather than criticism towards SBI being silenced many gaming circles, especially with a conservative leaning, became aware of the company and their questionable practices."
"Chris Kindred unequivocally kicked the hornet’s nest. If Chris didn’t instruct people to report the SBI Detected curator page, and to report Kabrutus’ profile for good measure too, the Streisand Effect would have been completely circumvented, no one except for a small minority would have given much of a shit about SBI and this entire sharade wouldn't have escalated to this embarrassment that we call a culture war.
Games magazines didn’t holistically cover this story. While Sweet Baby Inc are victims of a smear campaign predominantly due to the spread of misinformation, thanks to loudmouth employees who thought it was a great idea to silence their detractors the company itself was a bad bad Baby. No statements from the company denouncing the employees actions were issued, nor was anyone fired, nor did outlets such as PC Gamer just call a harassment campaign a harassment campaign, this gave ideologues such as The Quartering ample ammunition in order to spread their narrative far and wide."
As you can see in the quotes we absolutely did not do this, we said very clearly that the reason this whole thing got as big as it did was because of the cancel campaign, that was why the boycott got a massive surge of support, we also made it clear what SBI do and that yes, they do have an agenda and some people won't like it, we never said or implied that there was no reason for the boycott, just that much of the propaganda used to justify it is false.
The "couple of idiots" we used as examples are the media personalities behind the boycott, they are the ones fuelling it and driving it, if you don't share their words and their views then the video isn't an attack on you and you shouldn't take it as such.
If you disagree with our views on SBI or cultural issues, that's totally fine, but you didn't just say you *disagreed*, you said we *misrepresented*, and you said that we misrepresented the situation by acting as if SBI had no reason to be persecuted, and that's why I have to give pushback there, you accused us of misrepresentation and then misrepresented our presentation yourself.
what a bad video...the arguments you are making, make no sense. its exactly like everybody portraits it. SBI is just full of ideology and not demographic representation. even on the argument with the 2 black guys (mass effect), you yourself points out that skincolor doesnt matter in this instance, its just a good written and executed dialogue. yet she herself claims it to be this awesome moment where skincolor is very representative for her. its just forcing another ones opinion onto media, nobody wants and likes that, no matter the intention. think of the company that she was consulting...maybe they just wanted her input on critical scenes and wanted to know, if they should cut them out ahead or if they are managable - and they did not plan to invest for more advanced dialogue like she suggested, as she saw this oppurtunity - it was probably not her job and she was let go. they probably even hired her, after she scared their marketing team to investigate such critical scenes (as she was scaring them with the idea of bad press) and that was all she was hired for. as you said in the beginning: we dont know, its all just hearsay and one opinion...and all your arguments that you build on in this video just crumble - because its only one perspective on the matter.
😂
You do realise that what we pointed out with the Mass Effect example, that Jacob was well written and not an archetype, was EXACTLY what Kim Belair was praising, right? That's not an opinion we formed by ourselves, we got it from her talk, that characterisation was exactly why she thought it was an awesome moment, she wasn't forcing an opinion on anyone she was explaining what the moment meant to her to show what characterisation she would like to see in stories.
Yes, not wanting to use more advanced dialogue for the dating example is probably why they cut her suggestion, but it's hilarious that you suggest this would be her not doing her job properly and being let go, if you bothered to pay attention to the talk she said that she was thanked for her work by the company and they liked her service, the disappointment with how things went was on her end. Even more clownish is that you base your assumption she somehow got the boot because you think she intimidated marketing people into getting her hired in the first place, where did you get that idea from? An out of context clip we dedicated an entire segment to explaining as misrepresented.
What we said was that we don't know and a lot of this is hearsay, yes, but you missed out a very important point we made at the end of that statement, which was that although there is a lot of mystery around SBI's work when their detractors have made specific claims these claims have been proven wrong, we gave specific examples of this like Saga Anderson's race and Suicide Squad's story.
And yes, the video is only one perspective on the matter, because it's an opinion piece, if you want other people's opinions you're welcome to go and watch other videos about the topic, as I'm sure you already did given the bias shown in your comment, our opinion just happened to be one you didn't like hearing, that doesn't mean it's wrong.
So the reason our arguments didn't make sense to you is because you didn't pay attention to them and stuck with the image that was already in your head, if you consciously choose not to listen then obviously you'll be deaf to our points, but at the end of the day that's a you problem not an us problem.
@@elwood6841 You are pointing at the exact problem, its her opinion and views. she has no highness or advantage than any other gamer regarding representation in content. yet ask any gamer and they would rather not have a 3rd hand in the character-writing/developement than wanted to be guided. gaming is entertainment, subjective media and not some community plattform (except maybe sandboxes or smth like that). we just want good writing, having fun with a game despite if it represents us or not. and yet she is standing there and sees it as a kind of way to advance social acceptance - its just not, thats only her opinion. she can publish that in any magazine or blog but as a consultant that has a clear ideology, its just wrong on so many levels. not even speaking of the representative side of that.
I think you missunderstood me there, sorry if i was unclear. i was talking about how "rewriting the dialogue" wasnt her job at this point. in regards to her earlier mention of "putting fear into the marketing team", this is the outcome. they probably got her to make sure the company doesnt trip over the things she was warning them about. but this was her only job, that she even created herself. and a suggestion to advance the dialogue may alter the game, takes more time and money to develope, so they just cut the content. but i dont know either how it happend. im just telling you, we only hear her side, just some narrative. my narrative could be true aswell, the circumstances would be the same. and yes, you thank every external consultant with a smile while you part ways - thats just business practice. you can even get praised for going out of your way for doing all this extra work but on the company-side everybody just thinks "you did everything else but your job". its business language narrated in a talk about herself...nothing to add to that.
yeah you pointed that out but this is just a strawman, sorry. what claims and rumors the internet makes up is totally different from what you claim and think about yourself (and what you want to represent to others). thats why im only referring to her own words and not what anybody else has claimed. as a gamer i think of the idea to consult that ideology for story-writing is what is going wrong for years with the media industry...entertainment went downhill fast in the last few years, thats undeniable. and most of the content that is actually enjoyable just doesnt care about represantation of such things. there are so many things that need to stop with influencing entertainment and even the so-called "minorities in need of help" are speaking up against it. and thats why SBI is even talked about this much or even compared to gamergate. the details of who and where dont matter, we're talking about that this is even happening. anything more like the steam-curator or any other aftermath is not what we are talking about on this issue. the fact that this company exists and their businessmodel and how they do it and what they do is the problem.
yeah thats why im commenting. im free to publish my opinion too and iam sure you dont dislike the interaction with your video, from an algorythm-perspective. but you are just seeing facts, because thats what one side says. its not very objective to just represent it like this. and you are clearly not showing only your opinion because you try to show facts and try to explain stuff with certain sources. but those sources can also be interpreted differently, like i showed you, and are heavily onesided - you dont present that, yet you take it as fact, which is just wrong for the reasons mentioned above.
uhm yeah sure and i will surely watch other videos...i just find it fascinating while you put in that much work to make 1,5h of content talking while its so easily knocked down. and i was also intrigued if i maybe just got something wrong or missed something essentially...but no, you are just telling me that i dont like it, while avoiding the biggest criticism: you dont know it better either, yet you are telling a different story and harp on details while missing the bigger conversation.
@@knighToFdemonS "having fun with a game despite if it represents us or not" is something Kim herself talked about as we showed in the video, she mentioned numerous times that she enjoyed playing characters unlike herself, like Nathan Drake, yes she has a subjective opinion on what stories in games are for, and the companies she works with wanted that contribution, she didn't force it on anyone, and guess what? While some of the games SBI worked on were trashed like Suicide Squad, others like Alan Wake 2 are well liked.
I'm not even going to bother having the argument about the dating sim example further I you already have, because your point is based on assumptions you pulled out of thin air.
If you think consultation is bad, that's fine, we were not focused on going to bat for consultants although we see why some would value them, we were pointing out specifically that misinformation surrounding this topic is messed up, even if you dislike the idea of these sorts of consultancies, which is a fair opinion to have, you should have the integrity to recognise where people on your side of the argument are misleading people, your focus is not the same as ours.
You are indeed free to publish your opinion, we have an uncensored comments section and we like our ideas being challenged, we don't want an echo chamber and scrutiny is healthy, but I don't give a shit about your value to the algorithm, I co-wrote the video and I don't manage the channel, I would love more people to watch it but the analytics are secondary to me.
Yes, we show facts and sources as well as our opinion, that's obvious, it would be pretty stupid to form an opinion without any facts and obviously we formed our opinion based on evidence, we showed that evidence. Yes, we are one sided, we are not hiding it, we are not pretending to be neutral or impartial, we researched the topic, formed our opinion then presented it, we're not obligated to argue against ourselves or give a voice to the opposite take, as I said before you're free to watch other videos with other opinions and clearly you already have, many of those other videos I have no doubt are opinionated in nature and not neutral and that's okay, as long as you don't claim to be neutral you're not obligated to be.
I didn't tell you I don't like what you said just because I don't like it, I pointed out several instances where you misunderstood our arguments, if you understood but disagreed with our end conclusions I would have no problem with that, I'm not going to budge on the facts because they're just that, the facts, the interpretation of them is up to you. You can of course reject the facts as well, I can't force you to see what I want you to see, but then the conversation is a pointless one and it's just 2 people talking past each other, if you want to do that then you will quickly find you'll be talking to yourself.
@@knighToFdemonSL
Whelp. 1 hour 43 minutes. Great vid. My take on this:
Did sbi solely responsible for enshittification of gaming? Nope, many more factor than that.
Did all game sbi working for is a shit game or worse than their predecessor? Yes of course. Occams Razor. Unless you have devinite proof otherwise, flaming this discourse is the best way to show game dev we reject this ideology. It's also entertaining, ngl.
Edit :A little addition. I watch asmon, quartering, and gundam for years. Have some disagreement with their content of course. I remember quartering said long ago: Gamers don't mind politics in the game. Just not real world politics. You said they put word into kim's mouth but you also do the exact same thing. You called them grifter? Look in the mirror, because so do you.
I never knew women's league in sports games are "political" now, despite it existing in real life before you and I were even born.
"I watch asmon, quartering,"
So sorry to hear that. Hope you one day gather the strength to stop watching them. Have no idea who gundam is but I doubt it's anyone of any worth.
Its not just about sbi, it about the ideology that is fostering in society, for me " build back better " normally attached to these activist is disgusting because that means a destruction of what these activist are building on top of.
Then I would point you to the end message of the video, which is that even if you're in the same political camp as the kinds of people attacking SBI we encourage you to think for yourself, just because you might be right wing or see yourself as "anti woke" doesn't mean you have to take the words of people using the same labels at face value, if you do that you're essentially polluting your own worldview with lies for the sake of tribalism and that helps no one
For us it was about SBI, which is why except for a few references to issues like racism and what representation should be we focused on examples of misinformation and disproving them
I am tribal tho , my tribe is American ☺
@@earthforge3578 Being in a tribe and tribalism are 2 different things, you can be in a group, just don't ignore its faults or try to excuse them just because the problem is coming from "your team", because everyone is worse off if you can't look in the mirror
Warning. This entire video is a troll.
Sadly it's not!