Small, weak people need an excuse for why they feel so small. One that deflects the blame from where it truly belongs--on them, for lacking the strength and courage to be better than they are. For lacking the spine to take a more difficult, more noble road.
So just believe it's not your fault, it's some mighty shadowy conspiracy thing of great darkness. Not just you being a coward and weakling. Much more preferable.
Who actually cares? A niche group of people want to curate their games based on a personal preference. Nobody has the moral authority to tell them what they should or shouldn't spend their money on.
Except they're not just saying "we don't like this" and moving on. They're using dogwhistles ("woke" is only the first one) and 4-chan level type of slurs in their cries of conspiracy. It's a thinly disguised hate club, games are only an excuse.
They tried to progressively hide it from their group's front page, editing its language several times, but it was still there in the discussions in and around the group.
That's no excuse to try to get a user's account banned. You might want to read up on some of their tweets. The ceo is also a sexist and a racist. The steam group had like 1000 people now it has almost 200,000 after the whole debacle. Reputation is earned not given. SomeOrdinaryGamer made a good video highlighting stupidity from both sides.
If they are proud of their work, why try to hide it.
Awesome writeup. I had heard that some very special individuals were trying to paint this company as "pro-woke", and therefore any game they touched should be avoided -- and that's obviously going to be nonsense, but it's good to see the full story.
I'm not sure I understand what's happening here, but I'm looking forward to the five hour hbomberguy video explaining the whole thing in about 8 years.
When I was still buying new games, I've had development studios I preferred, and others I avoided. Those were simpler times (and simpler games), when one small studio did everything.
Later, additional external companies got involved, and some tried to hide their presence. I remember when The Adventure Company started using a very customer unfriendly sort of copy protection, and I started using a list of affectted games, so that I could avoid them.
These days, multiple companies are involved with game design. As a consumer, it's only normal that I'd like to know who had their hands on developing a game I'd be interested in. I haven't played any games Sweet Baby was involved with, but if I did and had a strong opinion (negative or positive) about their work, I'd appreciate a list of games they worked on, to make a purchase choice that would suit me best.