Half a Billion Dollars Potentially Invested in MindsEye

Thief1987 said:
Everywhere is what they developed from the beginning, and it's still in development.
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Christmas We Will See GIF by QVC
 
EviLore said:
450 employees, 8 years in development. "Several hundred million dollars in venture capital funding" already reported on previously.
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450 employees? My God. They beat Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed record. The end credit is a game length in itself.
 
It´s crazy if this is true. Where do this insane amount of money come from? How can you justify spending this much money on something like this and be so irresponsible about it?
 
I wish we could flush this one down the toilet and move on. Even the title of the game sounds stupid.

Dude bought a church and kept it from being destroyed. That was the last time I ever heard his name in the headlines. He was filthy rich after GTA and he could probably convince a group of investors that the sky was falling without this game.
 
How did they manage to waste so much money and deliver so little.
I'm sure this has to involve money laundering, hookers and cocaine.
 
It costs a lot of money to setup a new development studio and thats before you have to attract talent from other studios with higher wages and better benefits. I can see managers buying in to their own hype/investment sales pitch about developing the "next GTA" blowing vast amount of cash thinking they would easily make it back.
 
It looked jank from the previews, it looks broken from the footage we've seen of people playing the game… $500 million was spent by the studio between this and that other project? A stark reflection of the industry at the moment.
 
I didnt even hear of MINDSEYE before recent.

I dont even cared to click on MINDSEYE threads here, they all felt for the purpose of viral memes
 
Mr Hyde said:
It´s crazy if this is true. Where do this insane amount of money come from? How can you justify spending this much money on something like this and be so irresponsible about it?
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Benzies was the main producer of the GTA games. Investors must have had dollar signs in their eyes when Benzies promised them something spectacular (ie Everywhere). MindsEye was supposed to be an episodic single player game that was part of Everywhere, a digital world where you could make your own games.



www.eurogamer.net

GTA producer's not-crypto project Everywhere is part episodic blockbuster, part Roblox rival

In a former casino on the outskirts of Edinburgh, ex-Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies is readying his next big …
www.eurogamer.net www.eurogamer.net
 
Here's an interesting comment from the Reddit thread:

Build a Rocket Boy was founded in 2016. The studio has had multiple public funding rounds, and multiple private funding rounds. They have had hundreds of employees working on MindsEye+Everywhere for almost a decade, both in its CryEngine/Lumberyard form, and then in its rebooted Unreal Engine 5 form.

The game is a disaster because of Leslie Benzies. He has burned through endless employees, with absolutely brutal turnover at the studio, and he has spent a head-spinning about of investor money in this project. The Youtuber Cyber Boi has had fairly extensive interviews with ex-employees over the past few weeks, and they've laid out pretty much exactly what went wrong with the game, and while they don't know exactly how much money was spent, an obscene amount of money and talent was basically lit on fire to make this.

We know that BARB has had hundreds of employees working on this thing for many years. We've known for many years that the studio is completely dysfunctional because of Benzies and that they've been wasting an incredible amount of time and money chasing his ever-shifting whims.

Last year they raised another 110 million dollars via investors, and then laid a bunch of people off. They've had multiple funding rounds of hundreds of millions of dollars.
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kruis said:
Benzies was the main producer of the GTA games. Investors must have had dollar signs in their eyes when Benzies promised them something spectacular (ie Everywhere). MindsEye was supposed to be an episodic single player game that was part of Everywhere, a digital world where you could make your own games.



www.eurogamer.net

GTA producer's not-crypto project Everywhere is part episodic blockbuster, part Roblox rival

In a former casino on the outskirts of Edinburgh, ex-Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies is readying his next big …
www.eurogamer.net www.eurogamer.net
Click to expand...


What's funny is that some people assured us that Rockstar were dead because of an exodus of such talent. Yet without the Benz, Rockstar were able to ship Red Dead 2 in 2018 to widespread acclaim, and the current team is producing the most ambitious game of the generation:



It really makes you wonder just how much these teams really need the big names in the industry. As legend has it, Red Dead Redemption "needed the Benz!" to step in and save the project.

Now, this may be an earth shattering revelation, but perhaps it was actually the team, worked to the bone doing mandatory overtime to the point that their wives threatened to file a lawsuit, who got that game over the finish line!
 
EviLore said:
450 employees, 8 years in development. "Several hundred million dollars in venture capital funding" already reported on previously.
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The CFO and Chief Legal Officer both left a few weeks ago:
Article:
The Chief Legal Officer and Chief Financial Officer at MindsEye developer Build a Rocket Boy have left the company, a week before the game's release.

Writing on LinkedIn, former CLO Riley Graebner said he was "proud" of what the team has accomplished during his time there, stating that during his tenure the company had "doubled" in size, to "over 450 employees".

Graebner did not give a reason for this departure. In addition, Build a Rocket Boy's CFO Paul Bland has also left the company after two years.

I have the strangest feeling that we will be hearing about an investor led lawsuit a few months from now.
 
They've probably spent 90% of this budget with Everywhere, that Fortnite clone where you could build your own game inside of it.

Incredibly ambitious. So much so that it never came out.

So during an investors meeting ~2 years ago, they probably questioned "so, where's that game we've already invested 500M on it?"

To which Leslie Benzies probably replied "we will make Mindseye to recoup some of that investment"

And here we are today
 
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what? half billions?
and they kill themselves in their first?
it might be their investor pushed them, or they rushed in themselves.
 
Sunday afternoon. Mindseye Steam CCU under 400.

The peak lows next week in the middle of the night Monday or Tuesday should have the game drop to 100-200. Sub-100 isnt far away folks.
 
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kruis said:
Benzies was the main producer of the GTA games. Investors must have had dollar signs in their eyes when Benzies promised them something spectacular (ie Everywhere). MindsEye was supposed to be an episodic single player game that was part of Everywhere, a digital world where you could make your own games.



www.eurogamer.net

GTA producer's not-crypto project Everywhere is part episodic blockbuster, part Roblox rival

In a former casino on the outskirts of Edinburgh, ex-Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies is readying his next big …
www.eurogamer.net www.eurogamer.net
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Thanks. I knew Benzies was a producer on GTA and was behind Mindseye, but I didn't know it was part of this game making Roblox clone "Everywhere". Things makes a little more sense now. Benzies fucked up big time here. No way he is coming back from this dumpster fire. His reputation is toast.
 
It's like 7 hours long with extremely basic gameplay. Visually it's a mixed bag. How do you spend 500k on that..
 
Braag said:
It's like 7 hours long with extremely basic gameplay. Visually it's a mixed bag. How do you spend 500k on that..
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As Mr Hyde said above based on the vid, Les Benzies got a shit load of money based off his Rockstar GTA fame.

So his big project was making a community creation engine game, in which Mindseye was based off it. If you watch other videos of their Everywhere creation sampler, they showed a sci fi shooter. Mindseye is a reskin as the character moves and shoots almost the exact same. The setting is different.

Who knows how the employees are split across the two projects, but pending the articles you read they got somewhere between 300-450 employees! That'll burn through cash fast. And no doubt Benzies pocketed a good chunk of it as founder.

Another example of a good video game grift. Raise tons of investor money, promise a big project they cant handle, and it fizzles out. BUT, at least everyone on the payroll and the owner get paid good money for years of service for a junk product.

After it fails, close up shop. And repeat the process making another studio hoping for more investor money.
 
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Starting to become a pattern, isn't it.

The whole "Ex dev starts a studio with the biggest promises".

and then takes their investors for a ride.

at least this time Sony didn't fall for it, Sorry to see that IO did though, I do love that studio.
 
Braag said:
It's like 7 hours long with extremely basic gameplay. Visually it's a mixed bag. How do you spend 500k on that..
Click to expand...
Everywhere and Mindseye are intrisincly linked, even though they are doing a good job at pretending like they aren't.

the whole level remix thing in Mindseye is literally just Everywhere but with Mindseye assets.
 
StueyDuck said:
Starting to become a pattern, isn't it.

The whole "Ex dev starts a studio with the biggest promises".

and then takes their investors for a ride.

at least this time Sony didn't fall for it, Sorry to see that IO did though, I do love that studio.
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Tech is probably the only industry where you can raise a lot of money based off nothing. And even crazier, after that is done a big company might swoop in and buy them out too. And the studio hasnt even released their game yet. All they might have is some early storyboard kind of stuff and somehow that's good enough to be bought out. It's like hitting the lottery. The worst by far was the dot.com boom 25 years ago. As long as you had a website and got approved to list shares on Nasdaq immediately youre company was probably worth $1-10 billion market cap and you could have zero.

I dont think there is one other sector that does the same crazy stuff. If there's any buys outs, its based off a big company gobbling up a company or some of their brands based on something established. And the point is they see something good and want to grow it or turn it around. But at least there's something to work with. My company buys out brands and companies too, but there has to be existing business already selling. Nobody buys out a company based off dreams or napkin math.

No wonder so many big tech corporations lose their shirt rolling the dice on this kind of acquisition and product strategy.
 
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peish said:
I didnt even hear of MINDSEYE before recent.

I dont even cared to click on MINDSEYE threads here, they all felt for the purpose of viral memes
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Same.
From going by Reddit, social media and other forums. Were not alone either.

This massive boondoggle just appeared from nothing.
It feels like some sort of tax right off or some shit.
Absolutely bazzar.
 
StueyDuck said:
Starting to become a pattern, isn't it.

The whole "Ex dev starts a studio with the biggest promises".

and then takes their investors for a ride.

at least this time Sony didn't fall for it, Sorry to see that IO did though, I do love that studio.
Click to expand...

Man, you have no idea how common this mentality is. For years, I kept hearing "oh, this guy from Blizzard/Rockstar/Some giant studio started a new studio - we should really keep an eye on that."

No, you fucking idiot. How often does chasing some guy who worked on a successful game 20 years ago actually pan out? Almost never.

The annoying thing is, I get the sense that people still haven't learned.
 
Not fun to see, but it is fascinating. I'm guessing investors were sold on Benzies' CV and either didn't understand the game wasn't coming together well and/or were presented with dishonest demos.
 
Is this ponzi scheme or money laundering scheme? That is too much for this type of result in game development. Such a pity because it has so much potential and the direction looks good.
 
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