Sweet Baby Inc. Is Doing Just Fine
“Bowser is Bondage Daddy Sexy!”
–Kim Belair: CEO and Co-founder of Sweet Baby Inc.
That quote is from Kim Belair’s long-defunct (and as of today mostly erased) podcast, The Sexiest Podcast. It was one of several podcasts Belair was doing at the time. She was clearly throwing content at the wall to see what would stick. Sexiest Podcast completely failed to live up to its name.
It was a podcast where Kim Belair and a friend discussed various things they wanted to have sex with. Emphasis on things. Grummz has revealed that Belair has a collection of animal skulls in her home, which he assumed was for purposes of Satanism.
*sigh* I wish.
This is the person pretty much all of the AAA studios wanted to work with.
How did this happen?
Following the money is never a bad idea in situations like this.
This is the Powell Group.
It’s a consulting group that is fifteen years old (or thereabouts). They act as intermediaries between people who have a shitload of money and want to invest it in this new-fangled video game thing, without losing their shirts. And the gaming studios who are really passionate about getting hold of that money.
They appear to have been legitimate (at least for a while). They would do game scouting, market research, and data mining. As well as video game IP acquisition. I’ve heard* that Powell was instrumental in Flying Wild Hog locking down the old Shadow Warrior IP.
They also do agency representation but I’m not quite sure for who and regarding what. First chair E-sports gamers would make sense in that case but I don’t know if that’s what they do.
Regardless, all of a sudden, they’ve started offering additional services. Like Accessibility audits; because gaming can be problematic for people that want to play but have various disabilities like Parkinson’s or blindness. They will show studios where they’ve fallen short in making sure that literally, everyone can play the game they are designing.
And finally, they are now, and very recently offering gaming narrative design:
“We believe you need diverse voices to solve diverse problems.
Together with our partners at Sweet Baby Inc., we provide sensitivity and authenticity consulting at every stage of development. We connect you to an inclusive and knowledgeable team of consultants to best bring your story to life.”
That’s from the Powell Group’s own website. Given how recent this is, it looks to me like the money men are ordering Powell to prop up Sweet Baby.
This is just the stuff that’s easy to find.
A lot of these trails lead back to Ubisoft. I suspect but can’t prove that that studio was patient zero when Gamer Gate broke. There were plenty of studios like Naughty Dog that were only too happy to raise the white flag and invite in narrative designers and sensitivity consultants but none of them were as big as Ubisoft.
I’ll be going into that in more detail next week.
*From a third hand party. So grain of salt there.
