MindsEye Studio Confirms Its Layoff Process Has Started

Well, we all saw this coming...

Im hoping the days of releasing half baked garbage is over and the AAA industry acknowledges this and starts to shift. Its sad when indie studies are dropping the hammer and outperforming bigger budget games.

It was.......inevitable.

So they just not gon fix the game lol

As I said in a similar article on Pure XBox:

If you release a shoddy product and people call you on said shoddy product, and before releasing said shoddy product you make accusations that anyone saying it looks like a shoddy product is part of a coordinated negativity campaign, and you don’t allow people to review the shoddy product before it reaches the general public…

Well, let’s just say I am shocked, SHOCKED at this turn of events. Shocked.

The most obvs news of the year, unfortunately for them....

It's their problem, not mine.

He went into that portal and what he saw was layoffs 👀
and a parallel world where he was a character in GTA 6😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Well this is what happens if you release garbage I'm afraid don't like see anyone lose there jobs but what do people expect

Is this due to people being paid to attack it, too? Seriously, it sucks the regular employees always get hurt by their bosses idiocy while the bigwigs will still take home their bonuses and such..

And the £230+million they moved in December so the shareholders could withdraw funds that were otherwise unaccessible to them will mean those at the top truly don't give a f***

Job done 🍻

Someone please investigate this bunch of c***s

So years of support becomes weeks of support. This will be on PS Plus before the end of the year.

Disappointing. Was hoping they'd pull through, keep the staff employed, fix the game and make it great. Sadly everything looks bad.

Support a decade...for who exactly?
And well layoffs are expected, I mean you ain't keeping ***** employees in any company so.
Well if we're intrested this will hit psplus before Xmas

@Ravix theyse bosses and people at the top are pure scum I Hope everyone of them gets what they deserve

Tbh starting out with 300 employees in a studio with no titles released is not a good idea. It's always better to start smaller.

It’s so sad for the team. Hopefully the talented stuff will find new jobs as soon as possible.
Won’t support Mindseye neither…

@Ravix Any source to this claim? As £230m sound likes way more money than this studio ever raised in funding.

@Nalim "This will be on PS Plus before the end of the year."

I'm going to be annoyed when it happens as this garbage will take the spot of a potentially good, fun playable game.

Meanwhile management will fail upwards as always.

@SeaDaVie their public financial records that are available to anyone

"Reduction of the company's share premium account by £233,229,993 from £233,229,993 to £0.00 and the amount by which the share premium account is so reduced be credited to the company's distributable reserves" 20/12/2024

@Ravix Their registered accounts with companies house only cover the period to December 31st 2023.

Also, those numbers are hard to make sense of without a clear understanding of how their accounting is working. They certainly wouldn't be able to withdraw that kind of money, they would need to make significant profits to be able to pay out dividends, and those dividends would still be a small portion of that number.

How this could have been avoided by just delaying the game and fixing it.

However, it still will be a bad game but still..

@Ravix I found this entry, it’s for the parent company Build a rocket Boy, the game is made by Build a Rocket Boy Games.

It looks to be the total amount of investment received over their lifetime. It isn’t actual money they have, as their cash in hand is generally under £10m in their accounts. So it appears to mostly just be an accounting number, shifting from one column to another. Probably in preparation for the large profits coming their way which would allow them to utilise it.

@SeaDaVie I can't really be that bothered to get into it too much. But the records are there, just look under filing history edit: never mind you found it.

Basically, they moved the money from the share premium account (the account that holds the excess above share price that investors were willing to pay, but that can't be directly withdrawn) into the distributable funds, which can be used to pay out shareholders Edit: it's the excess paid for shares, not the total lifetime shares, so that would be real money, right?

Of course, what they did with that money is a mystery, but it stood out pre-release as a bit strange, and it stands out even more now that we know that they knew how bad a state the game was in before it was decided to be made available on stores and before a weird campaign to blame some 'mysterious force' funding negativity around the game was started.

Add that to the fact the CFO, and CLO left the company a week before the game release, the rumours of sh** conditions and wild changes of direction by LB and the higher ups. And now the 100 expected layoffs! It just seems like something that someone should look into one day, and I'd be interested to find out all that went on there, because I'm a nosey c*** 😛 And if it turns out someone was up to no good, then f*** 'em, they can answer for it.

@Ravix They’re using £0.0000001 as the nominal share price and £13.79 as the share price for each share sold in series D(the previous series of capital investment sold for different amounts).

So it’s the entire money they’ve gotten from investors over the entire history of the company. They have costs in the tens of millions per year though so that money is basically all spent on their 305 employees(as of 2023) and building leases etc. Their cash at bank and in hand at the end of 2023 was £1.525m.

So they anre almost certainly not redistributing hundreds of millions of pounds in this fashion(they’d probably have done it more sneakily using third party companies they secretly owned). I did notice that Benzies Directors fee is over half a mil a year, which is probably in line with what is normal for a company of this size but it does show quite clearly how much he has profited off the game over the duration while likely putting up very little of his own money.

@SeaDaVie interesting. How has the £230m+ number been moved into their distributable reserves as late as December 2024 if it is money that has been available to be used by the company from day one though? Would the number not reflect that as it is seperate from their costs and regular accounts due to its nature as share premium 🤷‍♂️

At least they had some massive tax avoidance, I guess.

@Ravix it's being treated like an asset by the looks of it. Or something like a tax loss that can be applied against future profits. So they theoretically can redistribute this amount of money is what I would guess.

@SeaDaVie the filings are fascinating. Netease pulled out as a significant influence in April last year.

I think its been falling apart for a very long time 😬

I've also seen suggestions that LB may have taken a consultation fee of around £5million via one of the many similarly named build a rocket companies they control, but its all speculation, i'm sure no one made any significant money from this disaster 👀

Edit: I’m going to stop now, as the focus should be back on the fact the actual staff are the ones being f***ed over here, as usual.

I don't know how many people commenting bought the game, but I did, I'm still playing and quite enjoying it. It's a linear shoot 'em up with an interesting storyline, a bit like TLOU, just not as long it seems and without the irritating teenager. I'm quite happy with the 50 quid I spent, I'll be even happier if the DLC gets delivered and it does eventually evolve into adult Roblox. I don't have a crystal ball though.

What no way this is happen 😲😲 nobody could see this coming

I mean why did they release it in this state, it’s crazy…

Everybody, we practiced this. Act surprised!

"painful decision to notify our hardworking team of some internal changes at Build A Rocket Boy"

I think it was more of a painful decision to everyone involved with the making and playing of this so called "game".

Sack the management and there will be enough competence and money left for the developers to do their job.

Well, that is understandable.

@Czar_Khastik ye sack them definitely the bosses at the top they should go it's the normal workers I feel sorry for I coudnt give a s*** about executives and people at the top

People should support this game. It's a old school rough around the edges fun game give me this over death stranding anyday

Having read reviews and watched the DF analysis, something went hideously wrong with this game - maybe several things as its perfectly possible to have a good looking / well performing game on the technical side of things, but with poor story/gameplay, and vice versa. The failings could also purely be down to multiple changes of direction and rushing it out the door.

I just hope that only those actually responsible for its failings (whether they be management or people who worked on the game) are let go, but I fear that wont be the case.

This is not surprising, unfortunately.

I dont think it being a catastrophic flop has had that much impact on this decision. They were always going to have people doing nothing that they dont need to be paying once their game was shipped, as is the norm.

@Nalim Should be pulled completely and refunded it's a piece of crap

After expedition 33 I have little sympathy for 200+ people development teams, if 33 people can make game of the year contender and 200+ people only can make this kind of bug infested game, well, maybe they shouldn't have working in gaming industry at all.

The talented developers that's been laid off can make new games with his/her other 32 friends.

Should have named the game Hindsight as in "In hindsight, we should have cancelled this game and found something else to do".

@wiiware The saying "Too many cooks in the kitchen..." springs to mind.

Lots of told you so's and gloating... You all getting perversely satisfied by beating a dead horse?