A screenshot from Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2024), Ubisoft

A former Sweet Baby Inc. employee, Kazuma Hashimoto, revealed that developers did not want to hire him because he worked for the video game consultancy.

Hashimoto was recently featured in an article written by Zachary Small at The New York Times, where he claimed that Japanese people were not upset about Assassin’s Creed Shadows and claimed that much of the pushback against the game and one of its main characters, Yasuke, was being done by Westerners using translators.

He told The New York Times, “It was people in the West who were upset with seeing Yasuke as a samurai.” Small added that Hashimoto explained “that many of the negative online comments written in Japanese appeared to have been roughly translated from English.”

A screenshot from Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2024), Ubisoft

In a recent Twitch stream discovered by YouTuber Smash JT, Hashimoto provided more details about The New York Times saying, “A couple of months ago The New York Times actually got in touch with me to ask me about Assassin’s Creed. In which I was like, ‘Yeah, reception’s honestly like kind of positive, and a lot of the comments you’d see under videos were like straight up like Google translate comments, which is pretty obvious.’”

However, he then noted how annoyed the Japanese people are with certain aspects of the game, “And like people are like annoyed with some of the inconsistencies and issues with Shadows, which is like the buildings and stuff being wrong or certain clothing and whatnot, right? Or the fact that the art team basically stole a sign from a reenactment troop in Japan.”

“And that’s actually like pretty common because when you’re working with such a large team of artists you-. Well, sometimes they’re sort of given the direction to Google things and people make mistakes,” he elaborated. “It’s more like you’re working with a team of people that speak multiple different languages and whether or not they can communicate with each other is an issue. And that’s just become part of game development.”

A screenshot from Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2024), Ubisoft

Later in the stream, Hashimoto claimed he did not work on Assassin’s Creed Shadows. He said, “I can say that I didn’t do any consultation work on Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The stuff I did with Sweet Baby I will probably will never be able to talk about just because of the way that game development works. So, yeah, it’s really, really weird.”

“I have a feeling that I’m going to get blamed for changes and decisions made on a game that I worked on that weren’t even like, that I didn’t even know about or wasn’t even aware of, or not even part of,” he shared.” Because when you’re a consultant they just kind of pull you in and they ask you for like suggestions and whether or not those suggestions are actually taken is up to the director. It’s up to the director. People don’t understand how much power a director and producer have in a studio and whether or not they will facilitate those changes.”

A screenshot from Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2024), Ubisoft

Still later in the stream, Hashimoto revealed that developers did not want to hire him given he was a former Sweet Baby Inc. employee.

He said, “There are definitely jobs that I’ve had where like people have seen like the fact that I worked for Sweet Baby-. And it’s been a year since I’ve worked with them and it’s just like a contractual basis when I was so just like periodically for like a couple of years.”

“People will literally be like, ‘Hey are we going to get harassed for hiring you?’ And I think that really sucks,” he said. “That instead of like, ‘We’ll protect our employee, the employer or the potential person giving you the contract will be more concerned about that then protecting their employees. Kinda f***ed up.”

A screenshot from Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2024), Ubisoft

Interestingly, this appears to contradict Kim Belair’s recent comments during an appearance on the Black Girl Gamers YouTube channel.

She said, “I think annoying is a very good word for it because largely it doesn’t materially affect our work. The vast majority of these companies already know what’s going on and they still hire us. They know what we actually do and it doesn’t necessarily change our baseline survival. But it does change our comfort level with which we can exist in online spaces.

“And so it ends up being this kind of like very challenging, but still like it’s just a distraction. It’s a distraction. It feels very much like it’s a time wasting thing. It’s a demoralizing thing. But it doesn’t affect your day-to-day, but it’s like noise outside,” Belair added.

Kim Belair via BlackGirlGamers YouTube

What do you make of Hashimoto’s implication that developers did not want to hire him after seeing Sweet Baby Inc. on his resume?