With Build a Rocket Boy’s MindsEye not quite seeing the critical or commercial success that the studio was hoping for, publisher IO Interactive had seen some potential in the title. In an interview with IGN, IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak spoke about this potential, and how the Hitman developer wanted to support Build a Rocket Boy because the studio seemingly had “some great ideas and a great world in the background.”
“The initial talks we had with those guys were to support them”, said Abrak. “We thought they had some great ideas and a great world in the background that they were building, and hopefully they’ll get the opportunity to show more of that in the future. And we just wanted to help them distribute the game.”
However, the release of MindsEye ended up being quite rough, with even Abrak mentioning the fact that the reception was quite tough. However, the CEO did note that the studio has been working hard to turn the third-person action game around, while also regaining the trust of gamers. Ultimately, Abrak said that there is still potential in MindsEye and its developers.
“Well, that was definitely tough, right?”, Abrak said. “It was a tough reception. It wasn’t what they hoped for, and also what we didn’t hope for at IOI Partners. They’re working hard on turning that around to regain the trust of the gamers out there, and they have tons of potential and content they’re working on. So hopefully they’ll succeed with that in the future.”
MindsEye was released on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S back in June, and was almost immediately met with a negative reception owing in large part to the game’s poor performance regardless of what platform it was being played on. Since its release, Build a Rocket Boy has been releasing updates to fix some of the game’s more glaring issues, with one hotfix from June promising to fix memory leak issues as well as the difficulty of one of MindsEye’s mini-games.
Build a Rocket Boy itself expressed disappointment in the state of MindsEye on release, saying that the studio was “heartbroken” that players weren’t able to experience the title as it was meant to be experienced. Along with this, the studio also noted that it was working on updates to make sure that MindsEye’s performance issues would be fixed.
“We are heartbroken that not every player was able to experience the game as we intended,” said the studio. “Our priority is optimizing performance and stability so that every player, across every device, can enjoy an equally high-quality experience.”
Since then, the studio has reportedly been hit by lay-offs affecting more than 100 of its employees. The report came about thanks to a 45-day consultation process that had been started by Build a Rocket Boy – a process required by UK law whenever a company is cutting the jobs of more than 100 of its employees in the next 90 days. Studio head Leslie Benzies had also reportedly addressed the potential of more around 300 jobs being cut from the studio in an internal email, where he blamed “saboteurs” from both inside the company and outside.
In the meantime, the planned Hitman collaboration with MindsEye has also been pushed back to a “later date”.
For more details about MindsEye, check out our review.
