"It would've been impossible to make a good game": MindsEye CEO and Rockstar vet blamed for impossible design demands, on "temporary leave" as company forces monitoring software on devs in hunt for "saboteurs" blamed for flop

(Image credit: Build A Rocket Boy)

MindsEye developer Build A Rocket Boy is trying to focus on fixing the game, which fell on its face last year, but can't escape controversy. CEO and noted ex-Rockstar veteran Leslie Benzies has temporarily stepped down from the company at a turbulent time which includes mandatory surveillance of studio staff, stubborn insistence that the widely panned game's launch was sabotaged, and claims that Benzies himself greatly contributed to production issues that ultimately crippled MindsEye.

A new report from GamesIndustry.biz collects testimony from representatives and employees (some anonymous) of Build A Rocket Boy. Benzies taking "temporary leave" and handing the CEO chair to co-CEO Mark Gerhard, per an official statement, is just the tip of this iceberg.

Clinging to assertions that "saboteurs" within the company hurt the game's launch or reception, the studio said, "Sadly, we do have evidence that there has been a coordinated campaign to purposefully and maliciously damage Build A Rocket Boy’s reputation and undermine confidence in MindsEye. We are working with our legal team and taking steps to address this."

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Build A Rocket Boy has been banging this drum for months. Fresher are claims that MindsEye suffered from familiar development issues exacerbated by Benzies himself. Stop me if you've heard this one: a higher-up saw something cool and told everyone to add it at the last minute.

MindsEye developers, including former lead data analyst Ben Newbon, describe an unpredictable and overstuffed project. "If management had concentrated on tightening everything up at that point, then it could have worked, but instead they kept on trying to throw extra stuff on it," Newbon said of a pre-launch rush.

"We had so many fundamental changes to the game that it would've been impossible to make a good game in the time we had," another developer added.

Benzies was apparently so notorious for requesting these changes – features to be added in "even like a month before launch" – that he earned his own personal category in the team's Jira, a planner which is used by many game developers to track task priority and progress in production.

This was reportedly amplified by an "entourage" of yes men encouraging or at least abiding Benzies' ideas, with one staffer saying, "They crushed their own talent under the yoke of appeasing a single person at the very top."

"He may have had a winning formula if he'd have listened to the advice from the literal hundreds of fantastic, insanely talented, and hard-working industry professionals they spent so much time and money hiring," another anonymous dev said.

Newbon minced no words in his assessment of MindsEye, which Build A Rocket Boy hopes could see a No Man's Sky- or Cyberpunk 2077-style turnaround. Since a February 4 update, Update 7 for the game, MindsEye's recent Steam user reviews have reached 80% positive, but the momentum looks small.

The problem with this plan, in Newbon's view, is that No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 had great games buried underneath, whereas MindsEye is "still an extremely boring game" even without all the cruft.

"Leadership do not listen," he said. "Plus, they've culled over half the studio. They don't know how to run a business. They don't know how to run a game studio."

Our MindsEye review clocked it as one of the worst games of 2025.