Build a Rocket Boy CEO Mark Gerhard says the studio has “overwhelming evidence” of corporate sabotage against MindsEye and intends to pursue legal action – while the studio has also confirmed a new round of layoffs.

The MindsEye controversy refuses to die down, even as the playerbase has dwindled to near-nothing. Leslie Benzies, one of the key figures behind GTA, launched the game through his studio Build a Rocket Boy to catastrophic results – and the company has once again made headlines, this time doubling down on claims that rivals deliberately engineered the game’s failure. According to the studio, the evidence of corporate sabotage is now “overwhelming.”

CEO Mark Gerhard took to LinkedIn in the wake of a fresh wave of layoffs at the Scottish studio, the precise scale of which remains undisclosed. Rather than focusing on the job cuts, Gerhard steered the conversation toward what he describes as a premeditated campaign to destroy MindsEye before it had a chance. The studio has reportedly spent months engaging legal advisors and outside partners to piece together what went wrong at launch. The process took longer than anticipated, but Gerhard insists the conclusions are clear: an organized, commercially motivated attack was carried out against the game. No specifics can be shared at this stage, as the studio intends to let the courts do the talking.

Build a Rocket Boy Has Spent 9 Months Claiming MindsEye Was Sabotaged

None of this is new territory for the studio. Even before MindsEye launched, Gerhard was already pointing fingers, describing a “coordinated effort” to poison its reception – allegedly involving bot farms flooding the internet with negative commentary. Founder Leslie Benzies echoed those accusations in the aftermath of release, and Gerhard went further still earlier this year, claiming that “a large American company” had funneled over a million euros into a targeted smear campaign against the game.

Those claims, however, sit uneasily alongside accounts from people who actually worked on the project. Former team members have cited internal dysfunction as the more likely culprit: brutal crunch schedules, chaotic management, and a development process that lacked any coherent sense of direction. Publisher IO Interactive has also pushed back against the sabotage narrative, indicating that its decision to walk away from the publishing agreement was driven by its experience with the team – leaving Build a Rocket Boy to carry the project alone going forward.

Whatever the truth, the game’s technical failings and near-zero playerbase tell their own story. Whether Build a Rocket Boy will ever actually get its day in court – and whether any identifiable industry players are truly behind these accusations – remains entirely unclear.

Source: 3DJuegos