With Leslie Benzies, the former Grand Theft Auto producer, now on temporary leave, the studio behind MindsEye looks like it’s drifting toward a very real game over.

Instead of an alleged smear campaign that reportedly cost an unnamed US company more than $1.1 million (which we covered earlier), the problems surrounding MindsEye and Build A Rocket Boy (BARB) appear far more likely to be rooted in weak leadership. Leadership that, according to multiple accounts, refused to listen to the hundreds of talented developers hired to make the game. Co-founder and co-CEO Leslie Benzies is said to have fixated on specific features or new ideas and demanded they take priority over everything else. Employees who spoke to the BBC in October reportedly dubbed them “Leslies”, though GamesIndustry did not use the term.

“I was hoping to hear more about the layoffs and where the company actually stood. Instead, we were told there were saboteurs inside and outside the company trying to take us down. Leslie Benzies didn’t seem to take responsibility for the game’s launch. It was genuinely insulting that he didn’t trust his own employees. The idea that we would sabotage a game we spent countless hours working on was just rude to me.” – said a former BARB staff member, recalling what happened inside the studio shortly after MindsEye launched.

“If management had focused on tightening everything up at that point, it could have worked. Instead, they kept forcing more and more things in. Leslie would latch onto something and insist that this extra feature be added – even a month before launch. There wasn’t enough time to test those things or get every piece into place so they’d actually work without breaking. Even with the best leadership in the world, there was no way to salvage it. Even if they fixed all the bugs and technical issues, it would still be an extremely boring game. Leadership doesn’t listen. And they laid off over half the studio. They don’t know how to run a business. They don’t know how to run a game studio.” – added Ben Newbon, BARB’s former lead data analyst.

Another employee, also pointing at Benzies, claimed their talents were suppressed for the benefit of a single person at the top. One former staff member even believed the game could have succeeded if not for management: “Benzies could have had a winning formula if he’d listened to the advice of the literal hundreds of fantastic, insanely talented, hard-working industry professionals they spent so much time and money hiring. We made so many fundamental changes to the game that it would’ve been impossible to make a good game in the time we had.”

Benzies has now taken temporary leave from the studio. BARB CEO Mark Gerhard described it as well-deserved time off to recharge after more than a year of working day and night. Gerhard said the company is deeply grateful to Benzies and that, with the management team and their support, he will lead them forward. It’s still unclear whether the leave will become permanent, but if several employees who spoke to GamesIndustry are right, he may have nowhere to return to.

Another former employee flatly believes BARB won’t survive this crisis – and that Build A Rocket Boy is nearing its end not because of saboteurs, but because Gerhard and Benzies brought it on themselves.

Source: WCCFTech, GamesIndustry.biz