Expectations were high for the first game from Build a Rocket Boy (Barb), the studio founded by former Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies after his departure from Rockstar North in 2016. Benzies was one of the key leadership figures that had overseen GTA's rise from a pioneering open world romp into a global cultural phenomenon, and Barb's first big project was supposed to be Everywhere: a multiplayer RPG in a futuristic open world where, ultimately, players would be able to author their own experiences.
Everywhere was hugely ambitious and backed by the staggering sums that Benzies' reputation could attract: Barb had raised £233 million by 2024, and by the end of that year boasted 448 staff. But it didn't have a game it could release and, with Everywhere's ambitious scope, a decision was made at some point to shift focus to MindsEye, which had begun as an in-game experience that was part of Everywhere.
MindsEye released in June this year and has been a disaster. Within weeks of the game's launch there was news of mass layoffs at Barb, the true scale of which is only now becoming clear. Earlier this month a scathing open letter was signed by 93 former Barb employees, alleging "systemic mistreatment, mismanagement, and mishandling of the redundancy process" by bosses Benzies and Mark Gerhard.
"Leslie [Benzies] never decided what game he wanted to make," Jamie, an employee who left Barb in 2022, told the BBC. "There was no coherent direction [and this] plagued the project from the start."
Former lead data analyst Ben Newbon says Barb staff faced constant "knee-jerk" decisions from upstairs, while most of the feedback being presented to management was "ignored and just never actioned." Benzies was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, something of a micro-manager and his notes and instructions were known as "Leslie tickets" or, as Jamie recalls, "Leslie bugs" or even just "Leslies."
The expectation was that the Leslies, no matter how minor or major, went straight to the top of the list. "It didn't matter what else you were doing, what else was being worked on," says Newbon, "the Leslie ticket had to be taken care of."
The BBC report goes on to detail a crunch period in the runup to MindsEye's launch, which saw most staff working extra hours unpaid (with the promise of time in lieu after the game's release).
But this just meant "mistakes started piling up" says former audio programmer Isaac Hudd, and "regressions" where one team's work would undo that of another were common. "And it does mess with you. You really do start to see the morale go down, the little arguments starting to happen. People are burning the candle at both ends and starting to think: 'What's the point?'"
Hudd tried to stay optimistic, but shortly after launch the reality was brutally clear. "You were just seeing disastrous review after disastrous review, and thinking 'This isn't gonna go well'".
An all-staff meeting at Barb in July, called after the game's initial reception was clear, saw Benzies say the negativity was "uncalled for" before circling around to blame internal "saboteurs." A transcript of his remarks reads: "I find it disgusting that anyone could sit amongst us, behave like this and continue to work here."
The reaction among staff, who felt they knew exactly why MindsEye's reception was so poor, was amazement.
Earlier this month, between 250 and 300 Barb staff were made redundant, most of whom were based in the Edinburgh studio. The Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) union's Game Workers Branch, which organised the open letter on behalf of Barb staff, has announced it will take legal action against the company, and its chair is taking no prisoners.
"[BARB devs] have been routinely belittled, cheated, and manipulated by the company they dedicated years of their lives to," wrote IWGB chair Spring McParlin-Jones. "Through the union, these workers have been able to force the executives at BARB to respect their rights. Let this serve as a notice to other executives like Mark and Leslie: the games industry is not the Wild West anymore. You don’t get to pretend that employment laws don't apply to your company because if you do, then the union will be there to stop you."
For its part, Barb claims in a statement that it handled the redundancy process with "care and transparency" before adding it was "committed to learning and growing" from the feedback. Hm.
"Leslie and the entire senior management team take full responsibility for [MindsEye's] initial launch," continues the Barb statement. "The version of the game that was released did not reflect the experience our community deserved." It insists it'll keep working on MindsEye and eventually deliver "the game we always envisioned".
That remains to be seen. MindsEye's reception was so overwhelmingly negative that the game's star worries about ever getting work again, while publisher IO Interactive has basically said it'll take a break from publishing for a while after this, thanks.
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