Is Sweet Baby Inc. Connected to Assassin’s Creed Shadows?

Video Games

You’ve probably heard the suggestion that Sweet Baby Inc. was involved in developing Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the new Ubisoft game that takes place in feudal Japan and has a black man and a woman as the lead characters. I mostly wrote this off because the evidence amounted to little more than the game’s lead writer following the consulting firm’s X account. Not that it matters; there are plenty of people and entities in the video game industry that think and operate exactly like Sweet Baby Inc., so their presence isn’t necessary to woke-ify a game. And as for the follow, well, birds of a feather and all. But some new things are coming to light that make me wonder if something more is going on. Today, @MangaLawyer posted this:

Meet the diverse team of Assassin's Creed Shadows! From the narrative director and lead writer to the level designers, the team embodies diversity most unexpectedly—a group of white Western liberal women who seem to dislike their skin 😍😆 pic.twitter.com/J9ZuUgda1N

— LearningTheLaw ✝️ (@Mangalawyer) May 19, 2024

See the lady peeking out behind that woman with the sky-blue (though partly cloudy) hair? Here’s a closer look:

Bro, I forgot Sweet Baby founder is a former Ubisoft Employee. It's her lmao pic.twitter.com/1MYIhYpaRI

— LearningTheLaw (@Mangalawyer) May 19, 2024

Yep, that’s Kim Belair, CEO and co-founder of Sweet Baby Inc. – the one who encouraged employees of video game companies to “terrify” their marketing team into adopting DEI practices. I couldn’t verify the caption on the first photo, so I’m not sure if this is specifically a shot of the Assassin’s Creed Shadows team (although it wouldn’t surprise me). But apparently, Kim Belair used to work for Ubisoft, and she is credited as a writer on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and a few of its DLC expansions. Now, here’s where it gets interesting: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is not listed on the Sweet Baby Inc. website. However, Sweet Baby Inc. was created in 2018, two years before Valhalla’s release. Moreover, Valhalla is listed on Kabrutus’ Sweet Baby Inc. Detected curator, with a note that it used to be listed on the Sweet Baby Inc. website but was taken down.

Again, this doesn’t mean Sweet Baby Inc. worked on Assassin’s Creed Shadows, or even that Kim Belair did so independently. (Development on Shadows began in 2020, after Sweet Baby Inc. was established, so it’s likely she would have worked on it as part of SBI, if she did at all.) But it makes you wonder if something more is going on. Sweet Baby Inc.’s name is an albatross around the necks of game developers now, to such an extent that Kabrutus has talked about one dev who told him they used Sweet Baby Inc. but were expunging everything they consulted on from the game in the hopes that he wouldn’t add them to Sweet Baby Inc. Detected. It seems odd that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla disappeared from the website just before the next game in the series debuted its trailer, amid the consulting firm’s name becoming a major turnoff for customers. After seeing things like Wikipedia editors rewriting history to protect Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Games Workshop editing Warhammer 40K’s lore to pretend their addition of female Custodes was always a thing, it wouldn’t surprise me that Sweet Baby Inc. would throw Ubisoft a bone and try to hide their involvement in the company’s hit series. That doesn’t seem like a great deal for Sweet Baby Inc. on the surface, but if their name really is mud now, maybe the best they can hope for is to work under the radar.

This is just guesswork, though. Until anything official comes out, nobody outside of Ubisfot and Sweet Baby Inc. knows about any collaboration on Assassin’s Creed Shadows. But there’s more shifty stuff going on than it initially looked like there was.