In a development that hopefully bodes well for fans of the company’s vast catalog of franchises, Square Enix is no longer listed as an active client of Sweet Baby Inc.
Per an archive of the ‘Projects’ section of Sweet Baby Inc.’s official website, at least as recently as August 2024, the Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth developer was listed alongside such fellow studios as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Warner Bros. Games as one of the notorious DEI-centric video game consultant company’s many, Triple-A level clients.
However, as discovered by users across social media earlier this morning, it seems Square Enix is no longer choosing to engage Sweet Baby Inc.’s services, as their logo has now been completely removed from Sweet Baby Inc.’s publicly displayed client list.
In the interest of caution, it should be noted that there does exist a distinct possibility that Square Enix’s disappearance from Sweet Baby Inc.’s website is in someway accidental or temporary, the possible result of a website error or file path misalignment.
But should their logo remain absent in the months to come, it would indicate that the supposedly-hard-at-work-on-Kingdom-Hearts-IV studio has chosen to, if not abandon their adherence to the performative concept of capital letter ‘Diversity And Inclusion’ all together, at the very least stop giving their money to an entity whose employees regularly deride their core audience – an overall positive development either way.
In regards to their history, while it’s unknown which of Square Enix’s specific titles Sweet Baby Inc. worked on, archives show that they contracted their services at least as early as May 2022.
During that time, the studio was responsible for enacting such ‘modern audience’-based creative decisions as censoring slavery-related dialogue in Final Fantasy XVI, covering up such female characters as the Female Warrior in the upcoming Dragon Quest III: Remake and Maya in Dragon Quest Monsters 3, and producing the entirety of Forspoken.
(And let’s be honest: If one were to put money on the entire situation, betting on the widely-panned, terribly-written Forspoken as one of the titles to have received a look over from Sweet Baby Inc. would be the closest thing one could make to a ‘sure bet’.)
Interestingly, this development comes just a few months after Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu gave a seeming non-answer to a question regarding the company’s relationship with Sweet Baby Inc.
Asked by a shareholder during the company’s Q2 2024 share holders meeting in June “I’m personally happy about the shift from quantity to quality. I hope good titles will come out in the future. I’m concerned about the Canadian consulting company ‘Sweet Baby Inc.’ Square Enix is listed as a client, but is there actually a transaction there? What kind of transaction is it? Will they continue to do so in the future?”, Kiryu deflected, “I would like to refrain from making specific comments about individual clients. As we shift from quantity to quality, providing content that is enjoyable and safe for our customers is also part of what makes a product fun. We will do our best as creators.”
Ultimately, just what this development means for the future of not just Square Enix, but also the ‘staying power’ of performative DEI initiatives in the larger video game outside, remains to be seen – but here’s hoping that everything will start shifting in a more positive, less-censorious direction.