The Fall of Valve
When the Sweet Baby Inc. story broke and the list of clients that have self immolated with their assistance was first published the only one that gave me a truly sinking feeling was Valve. When Larry Fink and his buddies first noticed that video games were a thing during the lockdown, they began their usual tactic of taking over an industry by buying fifteen percent of it, I really didn’t care that much about most of them. 2K, Ubisoft and EA going super woke was only going to provide me with new reasons to laugh at them.
But Valve? The company that owns Steam? That was very worrying. My rule on stealing games is, ‘only if no one is willing to sell it to me.’ Stuff like Wolfenstien (2009) or No One Lives Forever. But if Steam goes superwoke I’m going to have to revisit this policy. Steam has an effective monopoly on PC gaming distribution, sure there are a few other distribution sites out in the wild but they are to Steam what CrunchyRoll is to Netflix.
After the initial panic I had to step back and ask, wait a minute, Valve is barely a gaming studio at this point, I mean is Sweet Baby Inc going to fuck up Half Life 3? Is there going to be a TF3 with trans characters? What is there for Sweet Baby to infect?
We now know the answer. Here’s the description of Valve’s newest game Deadlock:
“Arin Fairfax, the eldest heir to Fairfax Industries has been living in hiding for the past 5 years after being shot and left for dead on their 18th birthday. Arin doesn’t know who is trying to keep them from taking control of their parent’s company… but in the avarice fueled viper’s nest that is Fairfax Industries it could be anyone. Taking on the name ‘Pocket’, Arin desperately wants to keep their true identity a secret… not only for their own protection; but because they want to forge their own identity separate from their parents.”
Ooooh, good.
Deadlock appears to be a Source engine version of Overwatch and before you say, isn’t that TF2? Here’s the “leak.”
Arin’s gameplay starts at about the 10:00 mark.
From John Trent at That Park Place:
“Sweet Baby Inc.’s goal is to inject diversity into games. Their About Us section read, “Founded in 2018, Sweet Baby Inc. is a narrative development and consultation studio based in Montreal and working around the globe. Our mission is to tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry. We aim to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.”
“In fact, the company’s CEO Kim Belair made it abundantly clear she was trying to take over the video game industry with her activism . She said in an interview with InclusionFX back in 2021, “In 2018, one of my best friends and I, we teamed up and we founded a company. The original desire was just to write together. We wanted to write with the two of us and a friend of ours and we wanted to write games. But we realized that as a unit we realized we were capable of doing for others what had not been done to us, which was to support us, empower us, to lift us up, to value our talent, and to help build our skills.”
“Belair also previously claimed she would do this by taking over well-established franchises because she believes that gamers would accept whatever slop major companies attempt to feed them.”
What she has mostly done is destroy the AAA franchises even faster than the Woke destroyed Hollywood. The thing about Hollywood is that you have long established and beloved characters like Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones that people want to be saved.
That simply doesn’t apply to triple AAA games. If I know in advance that Doom Guy is suddenly demanding pronoun respect I’m just not going to buy or play Doom Inclusion, it’s not going to happen. Gaming distribution doesn’t have anywhere near as labyrinthine financing structure as Hollywood. If a game bombs, it bombs and there is no real way to soften the impact. Gaming isn’t a matter of Go Woke Lose Ten Percent of your Market. These guys do go broke overnight and it doesn’t matter because there is always somebody else who will pop up to take their place. The AAA market is on life support thanks to companies like Sweet Baby and if Valve wants to join them it will be inconvenient for a while but ultimately monopolies always fail without government support anyway.
Something Larry Fink and his friends can’t understand is that gamers aren’t movie goers, its not a passive experience, you don’t just sit and watch unless you are playing something from Don’t Nod. We’ll drop the franchise in a heartbeat and never look back.
Forcing inclusivity into gaming is the fastest way to one shot a studio that I can think of. If programers suddenly get a list of documentation requirements that ban words like “Master” and “Slave” or “White List” and “Black List.” The 20% who do 80% will jump ship immediately and the studio will end up dropping a bug riddled mess like Red Fall.
If Valve collapses, we’ll immediately go someplace else.
