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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Gamergate 2

A week or 2 ago, someone made a Steam group called Sweet Baby Inc Detected. This group exists to let people know which games have involved the consultant company Sweet Baby Inc.

Sweet Baby inc is a company that seems to be dedicated to adding more diversity to video games, and many people believe their involvement makes games worse.

This heated up when an employee of Sweet Baby Inc tried to get people to report the group and it's founder in hopes that they get banned

This has been in my youtube and twitter feed quite a bit in the past couple weeks. Mostly it's accounts of employees behaving in similar ways as the above tweet.

I don't really play AAA games very much, so the actual effect of Sweet Baby on those games is not very salient to me, but when reading and hearing about it, I can't help but notice that they usually aren't giving many examples of of aspects of these games that people really think are bad because of Sweet Baby. In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.

What people are mostly talking about is how their employees conduct themselves on social media. And even though the way they often conduct themselves is unprofessional and dumb, It's also understandable when there's a hundred thousand people telling you how bad your work is and trying to stop people from doing business with you.

What are your thoughts?

The way a free market works is that consumers get to choose, for whatever bespoke reasons they so desire, which products they will purchase and consume. Producers would much prefer that they themselves got to choose which products consumers had to purchase. Corporate PR gets a lot of flak for being simple and predictable, but it is glaringly apparent when these simple predictable rules are violated. The fact that companies wish that their customers were pigs who they could shovel slop to every day and come home with an easy profit should be apparent from first economic principles, but consumers understandably take offense to that. Imagine if the CEO of InBev posted a tweet publicly asking Elon Musk to shut down all Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light trending topics and ban Kid Rock. I’m sure that’s exactly what they wanted, but InBev has enough sense and tact to understand how condescending and contemptuous that would come off as.