Kotaku Editor Alyssa Mercante Lies About Sweet Baby Inc. Backlash During CBC Radio Appearance, Claims Steam Curator List Was Made To “Prevent People From Buying And Playing These Games”
Spencer Baculi
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[Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Alyssa as ‘Alyssa Mercantlile’ instead of ‘Alyssa Mercante’. This has since been corrected. Original article follows below.]
In yet further proof that the mainstream video game press needs to fudge the details about the current discourse in order to convince the public of their latest ‘gamers are evil’ narrative, a recent appearance on Canadian public radio saw Kotaku editor Alyssa Mercante claim that the purpose of the ‘Sweet Baby Inc. Detected’ Steam curator group was not to simply help inform players of the consultation company’s involvement in a given game, but rather outright “prevent people from buying and playing” them.
Mercante offered up this piece of journalistic dishonesty during a guest appearance on the March 19th episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Current with Matt Galloway podcast.
Amidst a larger conversation in which she provided her read of the ongoing backlash against Sweet Baby Inc. – the full transcript of which has thankfully been provided by the CBC themselves – Mercante was asked by the show’s eponymous host if she could explain just why the company’s critics took issue with their operations.
“They believe that they have some sort of leverage against all these major gaming companies and that they kind of come in and demand that character be race-swapped or gender swapped or women characters are made more masculine or masculine characters are made weaker,” she told Galloway. “But in reality, Sweet Baby Inc. is a development company that’s a contractor, so they don’t really have any leverage against any of these large video game companies.”
[It should be noted that, while Sweet Baby Inc. may not have any concrete “leverage” against video game companies, its co-founder and CEO Kim Belair has proudly boasted of weaponizing ‘outrage culture’ in order to elicit ideological change in the industry.
“If you’re creative working in Triple-A, which I did for many years, put this stuff up to your higher-ups, and if they don’t see the value and what you’re asking for when you ask for consultants, when you ask for research, go have a coffee with your marketing team and just terrify them with the possibility of what’s going to happen if they don’t give you what you want,” Belair told attendees of her Now You See Me: Representation panel at the 2021 Game Developer’s Conference. “Because they have to consider – like, I say that out loud as a joke, but it’s actually very, very true – because if you start to consider the people who are player and audience facing and who have to deal with mitigating harm and with keeping the sentiment around their game and their project positive, there’s like a genuine value that you could impress upon them both ethically and financially.”]
[Time Stamp: 25:21]
To this end, Galloway would later ask Mercante just why Sweet Baby Inc., out of the many, many such ‘diversity and inclusion’-focused consultation companies that offer their services to the industry, to which she would opine, “I think it’s a perfect storm of a lot of things.”
It was then, in beginning her explanation of the “storm”, that the Kotaku editor would commit her noted act of journalistic dishonesty.
“Someone at Sweet Baby noticed that this account was made on Steam and noticed how it was gaining traction and noticed that it was intended to prevent people from buying and playing these games and requested that it be taken down for organized harassment,” she asserted. “And that kicked off even more organization from them, the people who made the Steam group.”
While Mercante at least gets credit for mentioning Kindred’s call to harassment, as opposed to The Verge’s Ash Parrish, who left out any mention of his involvement in her coverage for fear it would muddy her narrative, her claims as to the intentions of the ‘Sweet Baby Inc. Detected’ Steam Curator group could not be further from the truth – least of all because that’s not even how the feature functions.
Simply put, the Steam Curator function allows users to cultivate a running record of games according to any metric they like – For example, ‘Superhero games’, ‘Anime games’, or ‘Games published by Capcom’.
In particular, Sweet Baby Inc. Detected is meant to simply notify Steam users who voluntarily opt-in to it as to which games the company had a hand in – as informed by their own publicly listed credits – thus allowing them to make a fully-informed purchasing decision.
And that’s it. That’s a Steam Curator can do; keep a record. While they’re allowed to switch up their contents,Curators are in no way given any power to forcibly stop anyone from buying and playing – or not buying and not playing – whatever game they so choose.
As of writing, the Sweet Baby Inc. Detected Steam Curator list boasts 122,605 members.
Further, it should be noted that the list’s administrator, Kabrutus, has specifically gone out of his way to regularly request that followers “do not harass anyone, as responsible as they can be.”
“We do not fight harassment with more harassment, but with the truth!” he wrote in his initial announcement on the matter to the list’s members. “We are the good guys, let’s make sure that everybody understands that, ok?”
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