MindsEye was a high-profile failure, to the point where it’s even making its publisher, IO Interactive, think twice about publishing any more externally-developed games, but it seems like it was much worse for Build A Rocket Boy’s employees than anyone else.
It’s no secret that the game had a troubled development process, starting out as part of a seemingly failed metaverse project and losing multiple executives days before launch.
However, a group of almost 100 current and former employees of Build A Rocket Boy and the Game Workers Branch of the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) have published an open letter accusing the company’s leadership, namely co-CEOs Leslie Benzies and Mark Gerhard, of severe mismanagement.
It was so bad that, according to the letter, it even led to both mental and physical health issues for employees due to the intense crunch, not to mention the hundreds who lost their jobs due to layoffs.
‘CEOs Need To Take A Backseat’
The letter, signed by 93 current and ex-employees, opens by accusing executives of “longstanding disrespect and mistreatment” of their staff.
For years, you have expected them to adapt to your every whim, with those in disagreement being shut down or cast aside. We estimate a UK-majority of 250-300 workers across the company have now lost their livelihoods.
That’s much higher than outside estimates put layoff numbers. We never had specifics, but all we knew from an IGN report was that the number of redundancies was at least 100.
The letter pins the cause of the layoffs on the fact that leadership “refused to listen” to employees’ “years of experience,” and directly blames that for the game’s failure.
From there, it mentions that there are “many issues” employees have faced, but focuses on three in particular.
The first issue is “Lack of transparency and communication,” saying that executives “consistently failed to effectively communicate with the workers whose expertise the company relies on.” It describes information passed to workers as “sparse and vague,” and that they’d be blindsided by “radical changes” that were made without much input from those who need to make those changes a reality.
The second is “Unbearable levels of overtime.” According to the letter, in the four months preceding MindsEye’s launch, all employees were required to take 8 hours of overtime per week.
They were meant to receive 7 hours of compensatory time off per 8 extra hours worked, but the letter states that they were often unable to take it due to a constant stream of requests for extra “high-priority” work coming from executives, which even continued after the game’s launch.
The last issue the letter focuses on is “Disastrous handling of redundancies,” with the letter accusing executives of consistently “causing confusion and distress for all staff.”
Employees have received misinformation, been handed dismissal notices with the wrong notice periods, and been put in the wrong teams so that their performances were scored by the wrong people.
Those mistakes, and others like it, apparently could have led to “the wrongful dismissal of dozens of staff members.”
That’s not even almost all the problems employees at Build A Rocket Boy faced, and it all led to “pain and stress” for employees, with a combination of “burnout, job insecurity, health issues, and the failure of a game” they spent years working on.
The signatories state that “CEOs need to take a backseat and allow the skilled people who remain at the company to forge the path ahead,” and provide a list of demands for Benzies and Gerhard.
The employees demand a public apology for mistreatment and compensation for laid-off employees, as well as the option for those left on redundancy notice to either work through their notice period or take Payment in Lieu of Notice (PILON).
They also ask for a “concerted, meaningful, and documented effort” to improve conditions, with IWGB acknowledgment, and a commitment to work with external bodies to “action any future redundancies” and prevent unfair treatment.
The letter ends with a direct call to both co-CEOs.
Mark Gerhard and Leslie Benzies, you often refer to your employees as “family”. But we ask you to consider; is this really how you treat your own?
It paints a dire picture of what it was like to work on MindsEye, as well as providing some insight into some of the internal factors that led to the game’s failure.
Build A Rocket Boy’s employees weren’t the only ones who worked on the game who have expressed their frustration with how it was handled, as the game’s lead actor Alex Hernandez has spoken out about the state of the game at launch and wondered why it wasn’t delayed when it clearly wasn’t ready for release.
Benzies has expressed a desire to “relaunch” the game, but that seems unlikely after the layoffs, especially if he and Gerhard fail to meet the demands of the letter’s signatories and make serious improvements to conditions at the studio.
Hopefully that will happen, but we’ll need to wait and see how the co-CEOs respond to the release of this open letter.
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