MindsEye developers, Build a Rocket Boy, reportedly began its mass layoffs of employees following its disappointing launch.
Another development studio paid the price for an unsuccessful game launch. MindsEye developers, Build a Rocket Boy, reportedly began its mass layoffs of employees following its disappointing launch. According to IGN sources, the studio could see over 100 employees affected during the redundancy process. A standard 45-day consultation process starts today, June 23, which, according to UK law, is triggered when an employer proposes 100 or more redundancies within a 90-day period.
In UK law, if a company is planning to make fewer than 20 employees redundant, it doesn’t have to start a consultation process. If it plans to lay off between 20 and 99 staff, it has to start a consultation period at least 30 days before any dismissals take effect. However, if the company plans to lay off 100 or more staff, then a consultation period of at least 45 days takes place. This means 100 of its approximately 300 UK-based employees could be out of a job at the MindsEye studio, or a mix of its 200 overseas staff. Build A Rocket Boy’s LinkedIn profile currently says that 448 people work for the company.
Since MindsEye’s release on June 10th, social media and critics have noted plenty of bugs and technical issues within the game. Build a Rocket Boy issued an apology, stating how they were “heartbroken” and were “fully committed to ensuring all our players have a great experience.” The issues were so bad that PlayStation refunded multiple players, something that has not happened since Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous launch.
MindsEye currently has a Metacritic score of 38 for the PC version and 28 for the PS5 version, making it this year’s lowest-rated game on the scoring website for this year and last year. Looking at a sample size with Steam, the game hit a peak concurrent player count of 3,302 on launch, but had a 24-hour peak of just 130 players. As of now, 52 people were playing on Steam, with user ratings leaning towards mostly negative.
Sketchy rumours about MindsEye not being in a fully launchable state began when negative feedback flooded social media, pointing out the game’s bad performance and general bug issues. Despite many calling the game a pre-alpha version, Build a Rocket Boy and publisher IO Interactive continued to launch the title. But with so many issues, the devs and publisher began pulling sponsored streams. IO Interactive also faced flak for offering media “extremely limited” codes, not providing many outlets opportunities to play the game.
While nothing is official yet, MindsEye has been receiving a lot of negative feedback. So, it would sadly be natural to see employees reshuffling within the industry again. Build a Rocket Boy’s second game, Everywhere, which was intended to release in 2023 but has seen multiple delays, remains to be seen. There is a chance that some employees shift their attention to that game, but their first game tanked so hard that it may be hard to recover from.
