Tales of the Shire and 9 Other Sweet Baby Inc. Flops to Avoid
Tales of the Shire Trips Over Its Own Hairy Feet and 9 Other Sweet Baby Inc. Flops
If you’ve been anywhere near gaming news this week, you’ve probably heard the soft thud of Tales of the Shire hitting the market – and then promptly falling into the compost heap behind Mordor.
What was supposed to be a cozy, heartwarming Hobbit life sim has turned into yet another cautionary tale in the saga of Sweet Baby Inc. (SBI) involvement in modern gaming.
PSA Reminder: Sweet Baby Inc.
For the uninitiated, Sweet Baby Inc. is a Canadian “narrative consultancy” led by Kim Belair that claims to want to help studios tell better stories through inorganic heaps of diversity, equity, and inclusion…hard pass.
But to gamers who haven’t been sipping on the leftist propaganda Kool-Aid, their influence has become a scarlet letter: you spot their name in the credits, you brace for a torrent of forced ideology disguised as a bad game.
But if you are a game developer working on a game – watch out! Kim Belair advocates that if you don’t want to hire a DEI narrative consultancy that you’re now fair game for scare tactics to strong arm you into realizing that you do, in fact, need them…
And What About Tales of the Shire?
Well, that lecture came with frame drops, lifeless NPCs, and a character creator so disgustingly dripping in DEI checkboxing that it makes Mass Effect: Andromeda’s face animations look subtle.
Critics called it dull, technically clunky, and possibly the most boring thing to happen to Middle-earth since that one time Tom Bombadil started singing for four pages straight.
Image: Tales of the Shire Review | Steam
But this is hardly Sweet Baby’s first stroll through the garden of failure.
Let’s take a scenic walk down memory lane with nine other projects where the Stinky Baby’s name popped up – quickly followed by the sales popping down:
1. Unknown 9: Awakening (2024)
Peak All-Time Concurrent Players (Steam): 276
24-Hour Peak: 9 Whole Players
Imagine announcing a mysterious supernatural adventure…only for your Steam charts to look like a ghost town.
Unknown 9 peaked at just 276 concurrent players, scraped together fewer than 100 Steam reviews, and was such a financial black hole that Reflector Entertainment laid off staff and cancelled its next game entirely.
Not even the “hidden lore” could explain where all the players went.
2. Concord (2024)
Peak All-Time Concurrent Players (Steam): 697
24-Hour Peak: 0 (Deservedly Shutdown)
Sony bet big, anywhere from $200 million to $400 million big, on this hero shooter. The result was a masterclass in speedrunning failure.
The game reportedly sold fewer than 25,000 copies, shut down just two weeks after launch, and Firewalk Studios was shuttered before anyone could ask for a second patch. Sweet Baby Inc. was credited in narrative consulting, but nobody was consulting the players.
3. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024)
Peak All-Time Concurrent Players (Steam): 13,459
24-Hour Peak: 208 lol
Rocksteady went from Batman’s Arkham glory to this inevitability: a live-service superhero shooter that bled players faster than Harley Quinn’s ammo clip.
It reportedly delivered a $200 million loss to Warner Bros., and concurrent players fell from a max of 13,450 at launch to barely scraping triple digits.
Somewhere, Batman is facepalming.
4. Hyper Light Breaker (2024/2025)
Peak All-Time Concurrent Players (Steam): 2,436
24-Hour Peak: 15, Almost Sad
Hyped as the ambitious follow-up to Hyper Light Drifter, this title entered Early Access surrounded by uncertainty – not just about its roguelike structure, but its ability to attract a lasting player base.
SBI assisted with story structure and character development, but early buzz has been muted, and there’s already talk in dev circles about rough sales forecasts.
The “breaker” in the title might end up referring to the bank.
5. Gotham Knights (2022)
Peak All-Time Concurrent Players (Steam): 23,923
24-Hour Peak: 360
You’d think riding the coattails of Batman’s legacy would be a safe bet?
Instead, Gotham Knights launched with sluggish combat, grindy progression, and bugs that made Batgirl’s grappling hook feel like a coin toss.
Reviews were tepid, player counts dropped quickly, and the title is now mostly remembered as the thing people bought before reinstalling Arkham City.
6. Tales of Kenzera: ZAU (2024)
Peak All-Time Concurrent Players (Steam): 232
24-Hour Peak: 12
Marketed as a heartfelt personal story, ZAU ended up focusing more on delivering its messaging than on engaging gameplay.
Reviews leaned polite-but-unimpressed, sales tanked, and the studio behind it laid off employees before putting its games division on ice.
Turns out “emotional resonance” doesn’t pay the bills.
7. South of Midnight (2025)
Peak All-Time Concurrent Players (Steam): 1,438
24-Hour Peak: 86
The marketing leaned heavily into atmospheric Southern Gothic vibes, but launch day came and went with player numbers in the low thousands. Within weeks, those numbers were circling the drain.
Critics called it “another DEI-driven disaster,” not for existing characters, but for hollow, trope-heavy execution that made the whole experience feel paper thin.
8. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance (2021)
Peak All-Time Concurrent Players (Steam): 9,821
24-Hour Peak: 0 (Servers Shutdown)
A co-op ARPG with the D&D name should have been an easy win. Instead, Dark Alliance stumbled into clunky combat, broken AI, and repetitive level design.
Player counts plummeted after the first month, and servers eventually went dark. Sweet Baby Inc. was credited here too, but no spell slot could save it.
9. The Crush House (2024)
Peak All-Time Concurrent Players (Steam): 316
24-Hour Peak: 6 Whopping Players
An oddball “shoot and stream” hybrid that mixed influencer satire with first-person shooter elements, and missed both marks.
It failed to build a player base and quickly vanished from conversation. Think of it as an experimental dish nobody wanted to order twice.
10. Tales of the Shire (2025 Fail of the Year)
Peak All-Time Concurrent Players (Steam): 5,373
24-Hour Peak: 2,778
With Tales of the Shire, we’ve come full circle.
On paper, it’s everything a Tolkien fan could want in a chill experience: cozy Hobbit living, gardening, fishing, maybe a bit of pipeweed.
In practice, it’s everything that someone familiar with SBI would expect – painfully bland gameplay, sluggish pacing, and a world that somehow manages to make the Shire feel empty and sanitized.
For a game about the comforts of home, it sure makes you wish you’d never left the main menu.
Is Sweet Baby Inc.'s Reputation for Failure a Pattern or Coincidence?
Look, nobody’s saying Sweet Baby Inc. sets out to ruin games.
But the pattern is there: their name appears, the sales drop, and the Metacritic score slides into “bargain bin” territory. Maybe it’s just bad luck. Or maybe, just maybe, gamers are tired of paying $60+ for what feels like an interactive HR seminar.
Either way, Tales of the Shire has now joined the growing list of Sweet Baby’s dubious “achievements.” At this rate, the only thing cozier than their games might be the blanket of irrelevance they leave in their wake.
This was a commentary article based on publicly available information and personal opinion. Readers are encouraged to form their own conclusions based on the sources cited.
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No More DEI Plz
August 10, 2025
Just wanted to say they suck and I’m glad more people are bringing attentin to that lol
Ayefkay
August 11, 2025
Hey No More DEI Plz, I’m honestly glad you appreciated it! Thanks for stopping by and be sure to come back!
Shannon R
August 10, 2025
The sad thing is that there are even more games they made. Who would keep hiring these people?
Ayefkay
August 11, 2025
Hey Shannon, I 100% agree and even most of the AAA games that they’ve worked on ALL have some form of controversy that comes out with their releases. Thanks for stopping by!
Jasmine
August 13, 2025
Just went through your ghost hunting stuff but this is kind of interesting. Are these people well known or something? I’ve never heard of them before this.
Ayefkay
August 15, 2025
Oh hey, I just answered your question on the Phasmo guide, but yes – SBI are basically credited with starting off GamerGate 2.0 alongside Alyssa Mercante, trying to shove what they do under the rug.
Call Me Asmon
August 16, 2025
I watched part of Asmongold playing through Tales from the Shire and I barely made it past him making his character which was HORRIBLE. He kept trying to make the hobbit into a guy, but the slider basically forbids you to make anything but a grotesque woke abomination.
Ayefkay
August 18, 2025
Hey Asmon clone lol, I watched that too along with Vara Dark’s and the game just looks sooooo…bad. Thanks for stopping by!