Another week, another depressingly concerning development in the MindsEye saga.
We're close to a full year out from the initial release of the frankly dreadful open world title, and we're still being presented with bad news.
This time, unionised employees at developer Build A Rocket Boy are taking legal action against the studio, accusing the company of violating their data protection and privacy rights.
Basically, Build A Rocket Boy had reportedly installed some kind of surveillance software — called 'Teramind', which already sounds dystopian right out of the box — on devices used by the developers during the title's production.
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Management then refused to elaborate on what the software was actually tracking, causing understandable concern amongst said employees. The software was removed in March, but only after 40 developers signed and filed a complaint to the powers that be.
But apparently, the resulting problem is that Build A Rocket Boy still won't divulge the full purpose of Teramind — employees still don't even know exactly what kind of data it was farming.
Incredibly, an internal meeting between studio bosses Mark Gerhard and Leslie Benzies was leaked to the press, as per Game Developer. According to the leak, not only was Teramind installed on studio hardware without employee knowledge, it "tracks users' key strokes, records screen activity, and captures microphone audio".
And, perhaps unsurprisingly, this isn't the first time that the company has been accused of mistreatment. A report from October of last year claimed that management was guilty of "longstanding disrespect" towards employees.
Oh, and that was before said management seemingly went off the deep end, stating that the failure of MindsEye was down to some kind of corporate sabotage. Like we say, it just never stops.
As far as we know, Build A Rocket Boy still intends to try and "fix" MindsEye, but it's been pretty quiet on that front for a while.
Can you believe that stories like this are still emerging? Order a drone strike on the comments section below.