MindsEye developers were "laughed at" when they raised concerns

MindsEye has been an unprecedented disaster. Build a Rocket Boy's debut game, helmed by former Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies, launched laden with technical issues, becoming the worst-reviewed game of 2025 and struggling to hit more than 250 concurrent players on launch weekend. The suspension of sponsored streams followed, as did a massive influx of refunds on both Steam and the PlayStation Store.

What followed were, perhaps unsurprisingly, hundreds of redundancies, and more recently the threat of legal action from those laid off, who claim they feel “used and discarded” by company executives who have “chosen not to take responsibility for [MindsEye’s] wrong”.

This failure has now been described in greater terms, with a new report from the BBC suggesting that Benzies “never decided what game he wanted to make.”

Benzie's working style “plagued the project from the start”

The BBC spoke to several current and former Build a Rocket Boy employees who paint a dire picture of the development of MindsEye.

A former employee thought the studio had “something pretty special” when it started working on a multiplayer RPG set in a futuristic city, but things changed when development moved to MindsEye. “Leslie never decided what game he wanted to do,” they told the BBC. “There was no coherent direction”. This specific lack of direction “plagued the project from the start”.

According to the report, many of MindsEye's problems stemmed from the fact that the data analytics team “rarely received a response when they flagged issues”, with the leadership team “repeatedly” refusing to listen to concerns and often ignoring points the team “hammered home”. A third former employee, Margherita “Marg” Peloso, said they were “laughed at” at meetings when they tried to raise their own concerns.

The MindsEye team coined the term “Leslie Tickets”, which referred to bugs or issues that Benzies considered high priority, meaning “it didn't matter what else you did, the Leslie Ticket had to be taken care of.”

After severe crisis, Marg told the BBC that the studio expected MindsEye to receive a negative reception, but perhaps not quite to the level that the game saw. Then came the “disastrous handling” of the termination process, which proved to be the catalyst for the forthcoming legal action. Something tells me this situation will continue to develop for a long time to come.