On Tuesday Mar. 12th, the leadership of Sweet Baby Inc. finally made an official statement on their current predicament from all places, LinkedIn. They seem to be getting the message that Twitter isn’t their own playground anymore. This official statement was made by Sweet Baby Inc.’s COO, David Bedard:
“For the past 4 months, my company (Sweet Baby Inc) has been targeted by a far-right harassment campaign / conspiracy theory.
This is a tough situation for me, my co-founder Kim Belair, our entire team, and our collaborators. More than the frustrations caused by the harassment, and the precautions we’re putting in place as a result of that, the toughness comes from the fact that this entire campaign is based on misinformation. Misinformation so wild and left-field (or right-field, I guess) that it’s impossible to even engage with it to combat it.
So, we spoke with press to clear things up about exactly what we do, and how we do it. Adding our voices to this conversation felt necessary, because what is happening to us is something that has happened before in this industry, and will happen again. It happens to not just us, but also to countless other devs, players, journalists, and creators.
Everyone who has reached out to me with kind words of support has also asked me what they can do to help, and it took me a while to find an answer to this question. But I think I finally know.
This is what you can do to help. Check in on your marginalized colleagues, and friends in this industry. Make sure they’re okay. Let them know that they are loved, that they are appreciated, that they are welcome and that they are talented. Tell them you’re not going to let this kind of hate push them out of this industry. Tell them that things like this won’t scare all of their community away – that they are protected, and that they have a place here, now more than ever.
I’d be really grateful if you did that.
Edit: Looks like said hate mob found this post – locking down the comments for now.”
Sweet Baby Inc. is shaken, and they’re putting on a brave face in the most non-offensive, beta manner possible. There are widespread efforts to expose their hypocrisy and corruption and deflect their attempts to utilize the DARVO strategy against us have been extraordinarily effective. Also, Mark Kern’s description of what’s going on with the AAA gaming industry has even attracted the attention of the owner and CTO of X/Twitter, Elon Musk. To put it simply, we are winning decisively. However, the dark forces that fund and maintain Sweet Baby Inc. and their cohorts have recently revealed themselves, but we will cover them in Part V.
Part IV of ‘The Sweet Baby Inc. Files’ centers on the person who sent that cope post on LinkedIn, Sweet Baby Inc.’s current COO, David Bedard. As of this writing, he protected his tweets to prevent anyone from contacting him or mining his past tweets. Fortunately, we at Fandom Pulse and the acclaimed investigative journalist responsible for the information provided, Nick Monroe, knew of this tactic before Part I of this series dropped last week, along with an additional investigation into David Bedard’s employment history and field of work, we also managed to archive specific tweets. This article will give you, the reader, a comprehensive profile of David Bedard, who, for lack of a suitable term, is a marketing hack.
Based on his employment history, David Bedard mostly worked in marketing for Eidos-Montreal (now part of Embracer Group) and Ubisoft. Right away, we already see the connection between David Bedard and Kim Belair, as she also worked at Ubisoft around the same time David Bedard did. This raises a question: Is Ubisoft compromised, and if so, to what degree? Is it just as bad, if not worse, than Rocksteady Games? For now, we won’t have an answer to that question, but we know that David Bedard became a self-employed ‘marketing and narrative consultant’ in March 2019. This raises another question: What does marketing have to do with narrative? According to Marxist hacks like David Bedard, they think selling the idea that their backward ideology is marketable.
Now, we get to the fun part of this article: the tweets. Again, David Bedard went into protected status on Twitter, but as we stated earlier, we archived these tweets before he had a chance to lock down his Twitter account.
Judging from the five preceding tweets, a lot of the defense of Sweet Baby Inc. from the gaming access media makes a lot of sense. When the backlash against Sweet Baby Inc. occurred, David Bedard immediately made an S.O.S. to every one of his gaming access media contacts to defend his corrupt company. We see that David Bedard knew the right crowd of people to ensure that the far-left outrage cycle began anew.
As David Bedard retweets Kim Belair’s psycho screed, for those who, for some reason, decided to come up with a ‘Sweet Baby Inc. Files’ drinking game, it’s time to chug the entire glass because here comes a tweet thread:
“I want to dive into one aspect of this (great) thread from Kim, who I work with at @SweetBabyInc. Before I got into narrative design, I worked in marketing for a few AAA companies. I’ve been one of the guys in these rooms and I want to describe the (bad) thing that happens. There is a feedback loop that happens in discussions at the highest level of decision-making and it enforces this kind of biased thinking. It comes from the way we acquire and read data.
What you need to know is that the number one factor that determines a game’s life or death within a company is forecasts. Forecasts not only determine team size, marketing budget, and other important metrics. They also determine a lot of people’s power within that company – hitting or not hitting your forecasts is a mark that follows decision makers forever.
The question not many people ask though is how are forecasts actually determined. And the answer is brutal: They just eyeball it. They eyeball it based on comparable titles, and assume your game will be around those same numbers, +/- a couple million based on ~factors~. I’ve seen it happen on nearly every AAA game I’ve ever worked on. They take the game, and determine a list of comparables to determine your forecast. This list is PURELY subjective, based on the person who does the forecasting. And it is based on factors that they think matter. “They” mostly being white men (like myself).
So what happens if your game has a female protagonist? It becomes the sole focus because it’s inherently considered a risk. That means they not only build the list of comparables from games with female protagonists, they actively exclude similar games with male protagonists. That means now, having a female protagonist is the defining feature of your game, regardless of other factors. They focus on it as its #1 trait. This is something they don’t do with male protagonists because that’s the “norm”. So now they’ll pull up Horizon and Tomb Raider…and then they throw in any other female-led games they can think of, including the unsuccessful ones, which failed for reasons totally unrelated to gender. Realistically, your game probably will sell somewhere in the middle of all of those, they say. Already your metrics are a mess. Because they won’t put in the GTAs, or the Call Of Dutys, or the Witcher 3s, all games with ridiculously high performance in the market.
Do you see it now? The industry has fewer example of big hits with female protagonists, and literally hundreds of examples of hits with male protagonists. That’s why they perceive this decision as risky. It reduces their forecast. It reduces their perceived power. If the focus were genre, gameplay, etc, any of the usual deciding factors, their outcomes would be different. But now we’re picking from a small and wildly varied sample of “women-led games” only. Finally at the end of the day, they decide to make a game with a male protagonist instead… and create one more example of success to compare against for the next go-round. And if it fails, it won’t change their perception of male-protag games because that wasn’t ever measured.
This only changes is when people responsible for forecasts can themselves look beyond the gender of the protagonist to determine forecasts. It changes when WE change the metrics and treat marginalized genders the way we do men, and when more games with female protagonists get entered in the data set. We need stop making decisions based on the past, and look to the future instead. And that can only happen when we examine the biases that got us to this point.”
There are a few takeaways about David Bedard based on this tweet thread:
- David Bedard compares AAA marketing to the Weather Channel. This shows that, again, the marketing department at any AAA gaming company is useless despite accounting for a large chunk of the game’s costs.
- David Bedard is both a self-hating racist and a male misandrist. One could claim he’s the latter to satisfy whatever pathetic sex life he has.
- According to David Bedard, it doesn’t matter how many or the quality of female protagonists you have in games outside of woke characterization; it’s never good enough.
- Once again, we see in David Bedard the usual pattern among far-left activists and those in useless professions: flamboyant narcissism and psychotic desire to control the behavior of those developing AAA games.
As you can see, David Bedard, while not as psychotic as his partner in crime at Sweet Baby Inc., Kim Belair, does show similar traits. Kim Belair wears the pants in this partnership as it’s evident that David Bedard is a very sycophantic, overly emotional, beta-male wannabe who has worked in the gaming industry undeservedly for nearly two decades. At that time, David Bedard saw himself as a creative genius that ‘makes things happen’ when in reality, he is simply a useless marketing buffoon.
It reminds me of another buffoon who, after boxing washed-up, past-their-prime fighters, thought he could take on a boxing legend. Here’s hoping that said buffoon ends up ‘finding out,’ just like David Bedard is doing right now with the abomination he created with Kim Belair.
A very special thanks to Nick Monroe for the information provided in this article.
What do you think of David Bedard, the COO of Sweet Baby Inc.? Please leave a comment and let us know.
NEXT: The Sweet Baby Inc. Files, Part III: The Maya Kramer–GamerGate Connection
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