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Grummz Profile picture
Mar 21 8 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Proof Sweet Baby Inc. ruins games:

SBI game Flintlock by @a44games has been overrun by woke:

"I used to work there. Flintlock was a good project with lots of potential, then it was ruined."

🧵(Con't) Image
Before I go further, please note this is rumor from a source that seems very knowledgeable about the studios inner workings. Take that as it is. If others would like to verify, please DM me anon.

The CEO and COO at a44 are no longer with the company, but the damage seems to have been done.

The good devs at a44, I tell you how to fix it at the end of this thread.
Did you know the protagonist of Flintlock used to be white?

When COO (and Casting Director) Andrea Topps Harjo joined the studio, her first actions were to change the character to hire Sweet Baby Inc. and change the main character to a PoC.

This marked the beginnings of the problems with the game and studio.Image
Audrea Topps-Harjo is rumored to have used the company's funds and manpower to power her personal agenda and projects, on initiatives not related to the game or even the studio itself.

One such initiative that I found is InclusionFX, a VFX company and advocacy company with shades of Sweet Baby Inc. Here is the bio from the company.

She held this position at Flintlock at the same time she ran InclusionFX.

I asked and confirmed:

"Yea, I have witnessed our UI artists making art assets for its website as their sprint tasks."Image
Image
Aside from working with Sweet Baby Inc. and making changes to the game, Audrea also directed numerous changes in HR in her role as COO.

In 2021, most developers were denied raises, and evaluations were postponed for at least 6 months. Audrea told HR to inform anyone who complained or asked questions that the reasons is "Is because I said so."

She also ordered the HR department to HIDE the salaries of the top execs of the company.

HR tried to help, but were unable to get past this. The team was worried about the studio finances.

Meanwhile, the new hires and changes to the game resulted in a project where "These people know nothing about how a video game is made"
After nearly 2 years of these DEI changes at a44, the damage had been done.

At this point the studio was purchased for $175m (an unusually high sum for a small studio, btw) by Kepler Interactive in Sept of 2021, a gaming collective fund whose founder also founded the Kowloon Knights gaming fund.

It was at this point that Audrea, the COO, left the company. Perhaps this was the start of a clean-up of the game's troubles?
The state of the game is unknown at this time, but is believed to be in shambles after this 2 year round of DEI changes.

As we now know, a44 reached out to Kabrutus to refute SBI's involvement, saying they are no longer involved and all their changes reversed.

But when Kabrutus asked for proof, they refused to speak to him any further.
Here is my advice to Kepler and the good folks left holding the bag at a44:

- You reverted the SBI changes. Good! Announce that you have terminated services with SBI and watch your PR soar. Gamers will flock to you. Don't try to hide it.

- Keep your MC a PoC but don't tokenize the character. Make it a great character with quality writing, one we can all love.

- Remove any sermons or preachiness or anti-white, anti-male racism and sexism from the game if it still remains. Don't lecture your audience.

Embrace the gamer, and they will embrace you.

Good luck and my genuine best wishes.

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More from @Grummz

Mar 16
Okay, lets talk about @MattWalshBlog . I'm going to upset a lot of conservatives with this but it's important to go in with eyes wide open.

Matt Walsh is a net benefit, but he's using you, and everything has a cost.

What Matt is doing here is called "framing," specifically by setting up a straw-man argument. Framing puts an issue into a new perspective favorable to the persuader and changing the discussion to their benefit.

Gamers are upset with Matt about slamming games, but he carefully reframes it here as the victim "I'm not allowed to talk about games." And it conveniently changes the topic (because of his reach), and ignores the facts of what started it all.

Gamers aren't saying he can't talk about games, they are saying he has been playing both sides: hating games and deriding them, then riding the publicity wave opportunistically, for profit (which is not bad in my book, just don't be naïve).

This is similar to how Journalists treated SBI by omitting the triggering event from their stories, and tried to reframe it as "harassment by gamers" (a falsehood). They are trying to get you to forget and talk about it in a new "frame."

Different topic, same technique. (con't)
Back in Gamergate 1, Gamers were also upset about journalists re-framing the issue of corruption in journalism as a "hate campaign" by falsely reporting, omitting facts and gaslighting. The gaming journalists and activists succeeded in that sense and the Wikipedia entry forever enshrines a falsehood.

If you want to see the real story of gamergate, just look at the Chinese version, which portrays the real facts without omission, buzzwords or editorializing.Image
Image
But Gamergate 1 had incredible momentum, and all gamers, from all walks of life and politics (yes, left AND right), that it exploded in social media. The scale was unprecedented.

Conservative media, and one outlet in particular, got wise to this and decided to give gamers a voice.Image
Read 10 tweets
Mar 5
Legobutts from Sweet Baby Inc., Zoey Quinn's "PR person" and Sarkeesian, worked hard to hide the real reason Gamergate happened.

Wikipedia, a woke hive filled with Cancel Pigs, was complicit. Compare the US version to the Chinese version where they had less influence:
Image
Image
US Game Journalists, who considered themselves "valuable allies" more than truth finders, actively lied and obfuscated and smeared gamers for an entire year.

These false articles, of course, were now referenced by Wikipedia as factual sources. The circle of lies was compete.
Gamergate directly kicked off the era of Internet censorship. Twitter began to police trend lists and shadowbans first started to appear.

Twitter users who noticed these things were quickly condemned as conspiracy theorists, but we now know they were correct (see Twitter Files).
Read 8 tweets
Jun 15, 2023
Blizzard would never ship Starfield at 30fps on consoles.

Today’s question: Starfield, is 30fps good enough?

What would OG Blizzard do?

Since I wrote the system specs for WoW, you’re about to find out why. Image
First, let’s address the elephant in the room.

WoW was not a 60 fps title at launch.

In fact, we were happy with 20 fps on our min spec hardware, and even that was tough to do.

Why then, do I say we should have never done less than 60fps if we made Starfield for consoles? Image
But WoW is a very different beast of a game, whose primary platform was PC, and during a time with a huge upheaval in the graphics GPU market.

We didn’t want to ship at 20fps on low end, but we didn’t have much choice.

Let’s tackle the game first…
Read 6 tweets
May 27, 2023
Modern game dev sensibilities.

I’ve seen this attitude a lot.

So many devs have forgotten the gamer is why we make games.

This dev thread makes it quite clear his master is the investor amd himself, not the game experience for gamers.

Narcissistic to the core.
I used to do theater, and the director used to always remind us that audiences paid good money for their seats so we damn well better put on a good show.

She warned us that acting for ourselves was just an act of self indulgence.

I’ve carried this idea to the core of the games… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
At OG Blizzard (not what we have now), we always talked about the value we provided gamers. And we always worked to provide as much value as we could in the games we made. We made Battle.net free when other services charged.

Now its flipped…(cont’t)
Read 7 tweets

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