The CEO of MindsEye developer Build a Rocket Boy says the studio now has “overwhelming evidence of organized espionage and corporate sabotage” that torpedoed the game’s launch, and is pursuing legal action as a result. Unfortunately, the enduring impact of those underhanded actions means the studio is being forced to impose another round of layoffs.
“As leaders we take responsibility for the outcomes of our projects and the decisions that follow,” Mark Gerhard wrote in a message posted to LinkedIn. “At the same time, the launch period was affected by factors beyond normal operational challenges and competitive environment.
Pointing the finger at a shadowy conspiracy doesn’t really strike me as “taking responsibility,” but this isn’t the first time Gerhard has thrown around these bizarre claims. Ahead of MindsEye’s launch last year, he said a “concerted effort” was being made by unnamed parties to trash the game, which included “bot farms posting negative comments and dislikes,” an allegation repeated not long after the game’s release by studio founder Leslie Benzies. In February of this year, Gerhard said again that a “very big American company” had spent over €1 million on a smear campaign targeting MindsEye.
MindsEye developers, on the other hand, pointed the failure finger squarely at studio leadership: Brutal crunch, gross mismanagement, and a lack of “coherent direction.” Publisher IO Interactive also rejected the idea of external saboteurs damaging MindsEye, and later suggested that its experience with the game—the first to be published under its IOI Partners program—had left it uncertain about doing it again.
There’s also no getting past the awkward fact that MindsEye is just not a good game. There’s plenty of evidence to that effect, but I think my favorite has to be this “official gameplay teaser,” which Build a Rocket Boy somehow saw fit to release to the public.
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It’s a poorly constructed clip of raw gameplay with some very obvious errors: Start at the 40 second mark and you’ll see the player’s car hit a pedestrian, who ragdolls into the splits; just before impact, you can also see, off in the distance a bit, a taxi (or something) enter the scene on its roof, then roll onto its tires and proceed down the street like nothing unusual happened.
Anything’s possible, and maybe Gerhard and MindsEye will surprise us with incontrovertible proof of a dirty tricks campaign. But the obvious question at this point is, why would anyone spend a million bucks sabotaging a game when the developer is already doing such a spectacular job of it entirely on its own, and for free?
It would all be amusingly weird, were it not for the fact that yet more game developers are now out of work. That it’s happening because the game is bad, and not because the game is good, doesn’t make it any more palatable. Gerhard didn’t say how many people are being put out of work in this latest round of layoffs—I’ve reached out to the studio to ask and will update if I receive a reply.
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