Ramblings

Are New Developers Caught in the Crosshairs of Today's Gamers?

Sean R/Just_Irish

16 Jun 2025 — 5 min read

For quite a few years now video games have been on a downward spiral. The shareholders and upper management have been pushing for their next payday and the developers have been pushing product after product seemingly with the same enthusiasm as an ant within its colony only to be cast aside when there's no more use for them. The inevitable outcome is a game delivered unimaginative, spiritless, and more than likely broken; all the while it was touted by journalists and trailers at conventions as the "next big thing". So, ultimately, you're handed a shit-sandwich sprinkled with gold flakes sourced from someone's expelled detritus after a night of consuming Goldschläger. But hey, the bread looks good; that's all that matters, right?

With this becoming the norm, people, but more specifically gamers such as myself, have become increasingly critical and wary, perhaps overly so in some, if not most, instances.

Well, recently the new(ish) studio Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) came onto the scene finally releasing their first IP MindsEye after approximately 8 years in development. It took no time at all for the game and studio to be torn a new rear end by most people. Even popular gaming journalism sites like GamesRadar are throwing shade at BARB's game.

For Full GamesRadar Review Click The Image

The first major mistake was the studio deciding to use Epic Games Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). This game engine has been the bane of all video games recently released in the past couple years. Games using the engine run horribly even on brand new "better" hardware and look even worse than games released 15 years ago. But, according to some people online, that's merely because the developers don't know what they're doing with the engine and it's code. Well, if that's the case, this makes BARB and all the other studios using UE5 look even worse and UE5 actually the victim rather than a source.

So MindsEye has terrible performance due to UE5 demanding a quantum processor, is predisposed to look bad due to UE5's blurry visuals and blinding lighting, and - at the fault of the gaming community - was thought to be an equivalent to Grand Theft Auto due to how the game was presented and also the founder of BARB, Leslie Benzies, previously having worked on most GTA games as a producer. While the comparisons can be expected, they shouldn't have dictated the gaming communities hype. All these factors ultimately boil into a nice steaming disappointment soup. And this is the problem. Now, I'm not about to say BARB and other studios are not at fault, they very much are, but I believe that we, too, are also at fault.

BARB came out on social media and stated that they are "heartbroken" that players are not able to enjoy their game as it was intended and, honestly, my first reaction was dismiss their apology as another parroted damage control press conference type of situation because of how I have programmed myself to respond to these things.

From @MindsEyeGame on X

Dear Community,

As always, thank you for your continued support and feedback.

To follow up on our update yesterday, we are sharing insights and actions from the past 24 hours at the studio.

We are heartbroken that not every player was able to experience the game as we intended. Our priority is optimizing performance and stability so that every player, across every device, can enjoy an equally high-quality experience.

Our teams have worked tirelessly throughout the night to solve many of these issues, and we have now identified that the vast majority of crashes were caused by a memory leak. This impacted roughly 1 in 10 of our players. We have developed a hotfix that addresses this issue (alongside other issues that our players have highlighted), which we are working hard to deploy as soon as tomorrow on PC and on consoles once it passes certification with PlayStation and Xbox.

We are fully committed to ensuring all our players have a great experience, and we will continue to provide frequent and transparent updates. We will do our best to respond to all your comments and feedback.Thank you for playing MindsEye. Thank you for your understanding and continued support – it truly means the world to us. We’re grateful and blessed to have you on the journey with us.

The MindsEye Team

Friday, June 13-15 – Hotfix #1 – PC & Console

What players can expect:

Initial CPU and GPU performance improvements, along with memory optimizations
Reduced difficulty for the CPR mini-game
A new setting to disable or adjust Depth of Field
Fix for missing controls in the MineHunter and Run Dungeon mini-games
Pop-up warnings for PCs with Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling disabled and for PCs with CPUs prone to crashes

Hotfix #2 – Week of June 16 – PC & Console

What players can expect:

Continuous incremental performance and stability improvements
Fix for the buggy wheels not visually spinning while driving
Fix for areas in Car Manufacturing where players could fall through the world

By End of June – Update 3 – PC & Console

What players can expect:

Ongoing performance & stability improvements
Rebalanced "Hard" difficulty setting
Animation fixes
AI improvements

But what if it isn't? What if they're genuine and really are bothered that they delivered a product that under delivered and cannot be enjoyed? Is it possible that our knee-jerk reactions to these new - or small if you're indie - studios could be too much and could possibly kill something great before it could be fully realized? I don't know, I'm a cynic; I already believe it's just a facade. No Man's Sky is one game that comes to mind that was extremely under delivered and, as of today, sits at a Very Positive 82% review rating according to SteamDB and it personally one of my favorite games to revisit and get lost in. Granted, it took a minimum of 5 years to get to where it should have been, but it did recover, and recover like a god it did.

I'm not going to touch on peoples claims that the game is genuinely garbage as I've no interest in buying or playing this game, this is just a bunch of hypotheticals and food for thought of when I saw the immediate backlash online to a game and studio I didn't even know existed. I do kind of miss not being so critical and just enjoying games for what they were, but the industry made me this way.