Management at Scottish studio Build A Rocket Boy, makers of notoriously panned GTA-like MindsEye, have reportedly installed monitoring software onto the PCs of their staff without informing the workers beforehand. The move appears to be linked to ongoing claims from BARB executives that the game’s prospects have been deliberately sabotaged by third parties.
GamesIndustry.biz and Insider Gaming report that Teramind monitoring software has been installed on staff PCs, with GamesIndustry stating the workers first found out by noticing that their machines were running more slowly than usual. The GI report claims that Build A Rocket Boy management subsequently came clean and asked the staff to sign an updated IT privacy policy.
Teramind’s software, according to the cybersecurity firm’s website, “enables proactive protection against insider threats, data breaches, productivity inefficiencies, and compliance challenges”.
During an impromptu all-hands meeting in late January, Build A Rocket Boy co-CEO Mark Gerhard reportedly acknowledged “confusion, upset, perhaps even mistrust” caused by the software’s rollout. “I think it goes without saying that we can trust 99.9% of this business,” the exec continued. “The problem is the one. It’s the 1%. That is the problem.” That said, GamesIndustry.biz and Insider Gaming appear to quote this alleged line from the meeting with slightly different wording.
The reports cite Gerhard as having said that the studio hope to be able to remove the software “within three months”, though according to GamesIndustry this hope was caveated as being tied to MindsEye’s success.
I’ve reached out to Build A Rocket Boy for comment.
That January meeting reportedly saw Gerhard claim that “a very big American company” had spent money in an effort to damage Build A Rocket Boy’s reputation. “Sadly, we do have evidence that there has been a coordinated campaign to purposefully and maliciously damage Build A Rocket Boy’s reputation and undermine confidence in MindsEye,” a spokesperson for the studio told GamesIndustry. “We are working with our legal team and taking steps to address this.”
Gerhard and fellow BARB co-CEO Leslie Benzies, the latter being a former president of Rockstar North, have previously alleged that MindsEye’s faliure was influenced by what Benzies has reportedly called “internal and external saboteurs”.
Speaking of Benzies, GamesIndustry report that the co-CEO is on “a well-earned temporary leave to recharge after more than a year of working around the clock”, according to an email Gerhard sent to BARB staff following the January meeting. Benzies recently issued a statement to Kotaku denying an accusation of sexual assault by an alleged victim of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, following the US government’s publication of the Epstein files.
“These allegations are false,” Benzies’ statement read. “I had a 3 months consensual relationship with this person, and I have never met Jeffrey Epstein, nor have I ever visited his island, his properties or travelled on his plane. Any suggestion otherwise is misleading.”
In October last year, 93 current and former staff at Build a Rocket Boy signed an open letter accusing the studio’s executives of having “consistently mishandled the redundancy process” which began not long after the game’s launch. In a statement issued to RPS, a Build a Rocket Boy spokesperson responded that the studio “didn’t anticipate having to make redundancies after launch, but we approached the process with care and transparency, meeting all our obligations”.
