MindsEye studio's troubles continue: staff receive layoff emails, founder blames "sabotage," player count at 22

[midian182]

WTF?! Build A Rocket Boy, the studio behind 2025's biggest flop so far, MindsEye, is not having a good time right now. With every employee at the company potentially set to lose their job, founder Leslie Benzies is insisting that the game will relaunch and is blaming the troubles on internal and external "saboteurs."

With Benzies being a former Rockstar North president and the lead producer on the GTA series from Grand Theft Auto III through Grand Theft Auto V, there were high hopes for third-person sci-fi shooter MindsEye – some wondered if it could even be a GTA challenger.

But the numerous concerned comments that appeared in the game's trailers proved an accurate foretelling of things to come. The game launched with bugs that broke missions and rendered the game almost unplayable.

As of right now, 22 people are playing MindsEye on Steam, down from the 24-hour peak of 38. Even the all-time concurrent peak stands at just 1,393 players. It has a Mostly Negative rating on Valve's platform, a Metacritic score of 38, and a user score of just 2.5. The PS5 version has an even worse rating (28).

The situation was so bad that there were reports of Sony offering buyers refunds, something it hasn't done en masse since Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch.

With the company promising to release patches to address the issues, co-CEO Mark Gerhard tried to place the blame on social media bots allegedly hired by Rockstar Gamers, calling it a "concerted effort" to "trash the game and the studio." The boss of MindsEye publisher IO Interactive said he didn't believe this was the case.

Last week, the studio began a 45-day consultancy period that is required by UK law whenever a company is planning to lay off 100 or more employees – Build A Rocket Boy (BARB) currently has around 300 UK employees and 200 based abroad. BARB said at the time that the cuts would "focus on delivering ongoing updates and performance optimization for MindsEye, while also ensuring the long-term success of Build A Rocket Boy's future ambitions."

IGN sources say the redundancy emails have now been sent to all UK workers at BARB. Staff at PlayFusion, which BARB acquired late 2024, also received the emails.

In a video call yesterday, Benzies insisted that the studio will bounce back, relaunching MindEye so it can presumably redeem itself à la Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man's Sky. He added that the game's struggles were coming from internal and external saboteurs, among other things.

Permalink to story:

MindsEye studio's troubles continue: staff receive layoff emails, founder blames "sabotage," player count at 22

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Turns out, there may have been a reason he wasnt allowed to have total control at Rockstar....

Why would you build an open world game that screams at the player for exploring, having fun, or trying to interact? if you want players to stick to the rails that badly....make it a level based game.

 

[godrilla]

The memes comparing it to decade or more games like gta4 didn't help. Those games from past had more environmental reactions than this 2025 game attempting to be photo realistic did not. Interesting how most see a common denominator with unreal engine 5.0 trend of pumping put failed projects and some go far as saying 5.6 will not improve this trend. Everyone is scapegoat except the root cause.

 

[Axeia]

The memes comparing it to decade or more games like gta4 didn't help. Those games from past had more environmental reactions than this 2025 game attempting to be photo realistic did not. Interesting how most see a common denominator with unreal engine 5.0 trend of pumping put failed projects and some go far as saying 5.6 will not improve this trend. Everyone is scapegoat except the root cause.

You know what is a massive success, maybe even game of the year? Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Coincidentally also made on UE5.
The engine gives you a lot of tools to quickly do simple common things. But it also allows for great flexibility in creating almost anything you want, that a lot of passionless developers create barebones slop isn't an engine problem. It's either people that don't have (the right) motivation, it that are pushed to make deadlines leaving no time to add polish.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Never even heard of this game.

So much indie and AA stuff getting released nowadays that you really have to stand out from the crowd to get noticed.

Usually by delivering a fun or nostalgic game, not by releasing a turd like this though.

 

[NumberNine]

Fascinating. The important thing about being a successful game developer, is releasing good video games. People have lots of options now and the market is fully saturated.

 

[airbornex]

Calling it "sabotage" when your game launches with mission-breaking bugs and a Metacritic score lower than the room temperature in Antarctica is certainly... bold. At this point, MindsEye has more conspiracy theories than players.