- 13 minutes ago
Following the disastrous launch of the video game MindsEye, employees of the studio Build a Rocket Boy have released an open letter detailing the mismanagement, disrespect, and terrible working conditions that led to the game's failure.
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00:00Remember Mind's Eye? Remember the absolute state of that game? I'm not going to lie,
00:03I bought it day one because I'm that much of a sucker for a third-person action game.
00:07And I really wanted to believe in this game. I think a lot of people did. You know, it's become
00:11a big ol' talking point in the industry as to what the hell is happening with Mind's Eye,
00:15considering it had a disastrous launch. But the studio builder Rocketboy are headed up by Lesley
00:20Benzies, one of the instrumental figures behind GTA and Red Dead and over at Rockstar bringing
00:24all these different projects together. Guy is an absolute veteran and it was weird that this game
00:29didn't launch in a better state. Now we have an open letter on gameworkers.co.uk written by
00:35various members of Builder Rocketboy shining one hell of a light on the reality of what it was like
00:40working under Lesley Benzies alongside Mark Gerhardt, who is the other member of management
00:45that was in control of the studio. And it's almost everything that you would expect. You know,
00:49whenever we have a story like this, whether it's Suicide Squad, Kill the Justice League,
00:52whether it's Anthem or whatever the hell, it always comes out that, you know, executives didn't know
00:57what the hell they were doing. They were pushing in five different directions at once. And all of
01:00the creatives on the bottom were just trying to keep up. Now we have a collection of specific
01:05quotes from the letter. Obviously, everybody is kept anonymous, other than just saying that they
01:10are members of the team. But it is pretty damn scathing. And it is interesting if you think about
01:15Lesley Benzies himself. Like I said, he was instrumental to bringing together the original Red Dead Redemption,
01:20as well as the GTAs. Like he's this legendary producer over at Rockstar. There were various
01:25emails from Dan Hauser, Sam Hauser, and Laszlo Jones, the original core team at Rockstar saying,
01:31we need the Benz when it comes to finishing various titles, getting him in to get things
01:35over the finish line. But that seems like that couldn't be any further from the truth when it
01:38comes to the way that Minds Eye rolled out and the way that Builder Rocketboy was managed overall.
01:43So they literally call out the management, you know, by name, you know, Mark Gerhardt and Lesley Benzies
01:48are mentioned at the very bottom of this letter, and for how the game turned out. And they say there
01:53was a lot of long standing disrespect and mistreatment of staff. For years, you have
01:57expected them to adapt to your every whim with those in disagreement being shut down or cast aside.
02:02We estimate a UK majority of 250 to 300 workers across the company have now lost their livelihoods.
02:08These layoffs happened because you repeatedly refused to listen to your workforce's years of
02:12experience, resulting in one of the worst video game launches this decade. There's a lot more
02:17that I'm going to get to. But again, you know, it's fascinating that they are repeating the exact
02:22same sentiment that we all saw back at launch. Minds Eye did launch terribly. It had ridiculous
02:27over-the-top bugs, lots of collision issues. You know, if you bump into an NPC in a car,
02:32they would just fall apart entirely. But clearly the game had a lot of, you know, proficiency in
02:38regards to its rendering. Like you do have really good character models, a really solid graphical
02:43presentation, not necessarily an art style. It's quite forgettable to a degree. But it is presented
02:49quite well in terms of a raw approach to graphical fidelity and rendering. Like, you know, you do have
02:54clearly talented people that are taking part as well as the actors, the cast that are bringing it all
02:58together. It is in the polish, the execution, the ability for the different teams to talk to each other
03:02that didn't coalesce, which is fundamentally where management comes in, where scheduling comes in,
03:07etc. And yeah, the fact that there were immediate layoffs behind the scenes whilst Leslie Benzies
03:12was out there saying, hey, you know, external saboteurs are to blame for the game not doing
03:17very well. And he wants to relaunch the thing. You know, assumedly Benzies, because he does have
03:22this history at Rockstar, is just thinking, well, you know, I'm not used to failure. I can bring this
03:27thing back together. I can relaunch the game. We can make Minds Eye what it was always meant to be,
03:32which in itself is a whole thing. I mean, you can look back at previous coverage on the
03:35Walk Culture Gaming channel as to the fact that Minds Eye has a whole side mode that is built around
03:40creating your own missions and, you know, different quests and things like that,
03:44different parameters that you can put together. This idea of this infinite play space,
03:48using the tools that make the main campaign, the campaign is meant to be the thing that shows off
03:52what you can do in Minds Eye. And then you would go into the create mode and, you know,
03:56just make content for as long as possible. It was very much Leslie Benzies doing his own
04:00version of GTA online because he's not associated with Rockstar anymore.
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04:22Now, I would recommend the entire report because again, like I said, it is scathing and it's incredibly
04:26honest. I love that this website exists, by the way. And I feel like we're going to get so much
04:31more
04:31insight into what it's like working on these various projects. And yes, the door will be open
04:36to various employees that just want to stick the knife in or whatever. But at the same time,
04:40I think it's a very much a worthwhile resource to have if you're working on a project and you want
04:44to get the word out without breaking your NDAs, which for the most part only ever protect the
04:49people at the top who ruined the project in the first place. A website like this can allow those
04:53people to finally have a voice. And in regards to follow-ups in the report itself,
04:58some of the specifics include, you know, they say there was a lack of transparency in communication.
05:02Information was sparse and vague with management often making radical changes to the way that they
05:07worked with little or no input from those affected. There were unbearable levels of overtime in the
05:12four months leading to the launch of MindsEye. Management implemented a mandatory eight hours of
05:16overtime per week by every single employee. They say that there was also a disastrous handling of
05:21redundancies afterwards. We believe you have consistently mishandled the redundancy process,
05:26causing confusion and distress for all staff. Employees have received misinformation,
05:30been handed dismissal notices with the wrong notice periods and have been put in the wrong teams
05:34so that their performances were scored by the wrong people. These and other errors have
05:38potentially resulted in the wrongful dismissal of dozens of staff members. In the end, the developers,
05:43you know, former and current are asking for a public apology from Leslie Benzies and from Mark
05:48Erhard as to just the way they were tracked, the state of the game, the fact they put years of
05:52their livelihood into producing something and mentioning something like, you know, the sheer
05:57fecklessness that is putting people in the wrong teams and having their, you know, their analyses marked
06:03in the wrong way. So even their performance scores and the potential leading to layoffs of the wrong
06:07people is sheer ineptitude. You know, we hear about this stuff all the time. Dying Light 2 before it
06:14finally came together for launch was an absolute mess in regards to the way that game was handled as well.
06:18I feel like these stories, you know, happen left, right and centre all the time, but getting it in,
06:22you know, in no uncertain terms from the people who actually worked on the game, like I said,
06:27is very eye-opening and extremely honest. They are calling for an apology. You know,
06:31they want to make sure there are better conditions going forward out at Build A Rocket Boy
06:36and have better approaches too. If they have to have them, the conversations around redundancies
06:40and cost cutting and everything else. So at least now we know what the hell led to Mind's Eye
06:45being in absolute state. And yet again, the executives are to blame. For me personally,
06:51I kind of do hope they can turn something around if not for, you know, the bottom line or whatever,
06:56but more so the creatives who did put their time into the game, the score, the characters,
07:01the acting, like that kind of stuff. And like, bless the dude who plays the main character who also
07:06played Link and Clay in Mafia 3, where he got out there just after Mind's Eye launched and he was
07:10like,
07:10I feel like I'm cursed. All I'm doing is being in these different projects that then bomb when they
07:15come out or aren't received as well, even though I love myself some Mafia 3. But still,
07:18I feel like the industry overall is quite starved of third person, you know, over the shoulder action
07:23shooters. And it's a worthwhile thing to pursue. So hopefully Mind's Eye can bring itself back
07:28together, but there's going to be some Herculean efforts made to get everybody back on the same page.
07:33Because ultimately it is fascinating, the idea of someone like a Leslie Benz,
07:37he's working for Rockstar for so long and then breaking away, forming his own studio,
07:40build a Rocket Boy and then kind of chasing the GTA dollar. Like when Mind's Eye was first shown off,
07:45there were a lot of comparisons to GTA. You have that third person shooting model mixed with driving
07:50sections. It's like a style of game that used to exist across the 2000s way more frequently and
07:55the beginning of the 2010s, you know, shout out to my beloved sleeping dogs. And so something like
07:59this can be embraced with open arms. It's just, you know, it does take that level of care and
08:04attention. You are building something from the ground up. You can't fall back on. It's the dude
08:08from Rockstar to just sell copies anyway. And you know, various times in the immediate fallout of
08:14Mind's Eye's launch, there were all these different quotes from Mark Erhard, from Leslie Benzies,
08:19talking about, like I mentioned before, external saboteurs, the idea that, you know, someone else is
08:24out there. Some member of Rockstar is sabotaging their game. They don't want someone else to succeed.
08:28Clearly, the proof was in the pudding and the pudding was burnt or smashed beyond belief because
08:33it wasn't edible whatsoever. And there's also going forward, you know, that conversation around,
08:37like I said, ex-Rockstar people, as Dan Hauser has broke away from Rockstar as well as forming his
08:42own studio. You know, Red Dead Redemption 2 was the last thing that he wrote. He confirmed to
08:46Ryan McCaffrey of IGN that he didn't write GTA 6. So he's looking forward to that tile to see what
08:51it's going to be like without him. But we'll see what, you know, these members of this core team of
08:55Rockstar who had this legendary run across the late 90s, the 2000s, the early 2010s,
09:00how do they fare when they're not a cohesive whole? We see this so much, you know, in so many
09:05other creative duos that split apart and are just not the same as they were once before. But
09:09when it comes to Mind's Eye, let's just hope that things can actually be brought together.
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