By Sagar V. Mankar Kim Belair, CEO of Sweet Baby Inc., recently spoke at the 2024 XOXO Festival, shedding light on the harassment her narrative development company has faced. She described the backlash as a “campaign of harassment,” largely due to the company’s focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in its work.
In her presentation titled “What Happens When You Get Harassed: A Sweet Baby Story,” Belair shared the personal and professional challenges her team encountered, particularly in the wake of their DEI efforts.
Who is Kim Belair, and What is Sweet Baby Inc.?
Sweet Baby Inc. is a Montreal-based narrative development and consultation studio co-founded by Kim Belair and David Bédard, former Ubisoft developers. Belair, a scriptwriter, serves as CEO, while Bédard is COO. The studio specializes in consulting for video game narratives, emphasizing DEI both in storytelling and within game studios.
Their work has contributed to prominent titles such as Sable, God of War Ragnarök, and Alan Wake 2. However, Sweet Baby became the target of criticism in 2023, accused by some of pushing a “woke agenda.” The situation worsened in January 2024 when a Steam user created a group named “Sweet Baby Inc. Detected” calling for a boycott of games associated with the company.
What Triggered the Backlash Against Sweet Baby Inc.?
According to Belair, the “harassment” largely began in October 2023 when Sweet Baby Inc. announced their involvement in two major AAA game releases: Spider-Man 2 and Alan Wake 2. Within hours of the announcements, the company became the target of online attacks.
Belair says that much of the criticism centered around unfounded claims that her company was responsible for adding pride flags to Spider-Man and for diversifying the cast in Alan Wake. Belair clarified that Sweet Baby Inc. was not behind these specific decisions.
“Literally, within a few hours of me seeing that first post, we were not only being accused of “forcing” a Black person into Alan Wake – which, one, is cool but we didn’t do – and also of putting pride flags into Spider-Man’s New York—which again, so good, love to see them, but we were not responsible for them.”
Belair says this misinformation spiraled into a coordinated harassment campaign involving threats and doxing from platforms like 4chan and Twitter.
Belair’s keynote detailed the emotional toll the harassment took on her and her team. “We lost our voice,” she explained, as the relentless attacks forced some team members off social media and disrupted their personal and professional lives. Even contractors who had briefly worked with Sweet Baby Inc. found themselves targeted.
What was particularly disheartening, according to Belair, was the scale of the harassment. At its peak, Sweet Baby Inc. was receiving around 300 threatening emails a day, many of which contained death threats. The situation escalated further when Twitter CEO Elon Musk weighed in, amplifying the campaign against the company.
“At its peak, which was somewhere around February or March of this year, we were getting something like 300 emails a day, which, admittedly, some of those are going to be spam or bots or whatever, but they were often accompanied by death threats and threats to our families.”
Sweet Baby Inc. remains committed to their mission
Despite this, Belair made it clear that Sweet Baby Inc. remains committed to its mission. She emphasized that representation in storytelling is not censorship but innovation. “Diversity in narrative makes things more visceral and real. It pushes boundaries.”
She also noted that while external support was sometimes lacking, the teams and studios Sweet Baby worked with privately stood by them. “I worried we seemed too toxic or too much of a risk, but the studios we collaborated with still valued our work.”
As she concluded her keynote, Belair reaffirmed her team’s dedication to storytelling: “We love it so much that we’ll continue even through the worst months of our lives, because our lives are about stories.”