MindsEye Lead Actor Criticizes Devs for Retailing Incomplete Games at Full Price
“I think it will do more long term harm than good to your reputation.”
Amongst all that which can be criticized about MindsEye – Build A Rocket Boy’s infamous third-person shooter that somehow transformed The Day Before into an overnight sensation, perhaps most notable of all is that it was launched in a blatantly incomplete state, its developers hoping to complete and polish it later after its release – an undertaking only two games have been able to embark on so far.
MindsEye Game is Bad
Criticizing such a tactic is none other than MindsEye protagonist Jacob Diaz’s voice actor, Alex Hernandez, who publicly expressed his opposition to developers full-price releasing incomplete titles, citing that, on his part as a gamer, such a business plan only ends up damaging rather than assisting a studio’s image.
Hernandez was exasperated at game creators releasing bug-ridden titles and then fixing them “post-mortem, post-release,” and commented that Mind’sEye was far from unique to do such and cited CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 – both of the latter titles which themselves made a return – as a perfect example.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a Game
“I’m not really a businessman, I don’t actually have any idea why that decision is made. I will only point out from a consumer perspective, and I’m sure many people would be the same, I think it’s worse for your image over time to release something which appears to be in a state of less than 100% and then sell 100% of the price,” he said.
“You have to be transparent about it with your consumer,” he continued. “And I, personally, as a consumer, would be glad to be told, ‘Hey, this game’s in beta. I know you all have been waiting an eternity for it, but you’re downloading basically an incomplete game.’ So, whether you’re lucky enough to play it for free on some kind of invitation list or for $20, $30, $15, fill-in-price, I don’t know what would be the way to go, but it’s an orders-of-magnitude lower price. ‘Please come play at our thing, give us some feedback, but keep in mind, it’s not finished.’”
Fire people at Game Company, Bro, Sick
Evidently, beta is a thing, an established procedure already, so I don’t quite understand what drives businesses to essentially have beta testing and not call it that. I, as a customer, would much rather somebody be clear because then I understand what I’m getting myself into.”
Speaking about MindsEye, Build A Rocket Boy just announced that the studio will face layoffs sometime soon, and more than 100 people – 20% of studio staff – will soon lose their jobs. The layoffs come on the heels of MindsEye being formally anointed worst game of 2025 to date, its Metacritic page presently sporting a user score of 2.6/10 and journalist score of 38/100, which are the poorest ratings of its kind for the year to date.
Update: MADDDDDD
