‘MindsEye’ Launches With Few Players, Meme-Worthy Bugs

If you weren’t aware that a game called “MindsEye” was dropping yesterday, you would not be alone. But the game quickly rose up the Twitch charts with a slew of both sponsored streams and those just checking out the game to see what all the buzz was about. Bad buzz, mind you.

MindsEye is a GTA-styled third-person shooter that is more than just an attempted clone, given that Leslie Benzies was its director, former President of Rockstar North, and lead developer on GTA games from GTA III to GTA V. So even if this wasn’t GTA itself, it could still be a cool conceptual offshoot, no?

It’s hard to describe this launch as anything other than a disaster. In the run-up to release, co-CEO of Mindseye’s developer, Mark Gerhard, answered a Discord question where he said he 100%” believed that negative feedback was the result of people being paid to give it. “Doesn’t take much to guess who,” later doubling down that he believed this to be the case.

Now that the game is here, however, the mess unfolded. Clips were widely shared about the game’s goofy bugs and often poor performance, MindsEye quickly ascending into meme territory. Playercount is no better, with the game peaking at 3,300 concurrent players at launch and trendlines that indicate it may not surpass that.

The $60-priced game currently has Mixed reviews that are 40% positive on Steam. MindsEye did not give out early review copies to critics so it doesn’t have a metascore, and it’s not a stretch to imagine why that might have been.

Many are wondering why IO Interactive would stick their neck out to publish this. An initial concept of a key GTA figure working on a similarly-styled game may have been attractive, but once it was previewed, things unraveled pretty quickly, and now we’ve arrived at this underwhelming launch.

At the moment, MindsEye feels like a game that will be in the discourse for maybe another 24 hours before the sands of time whisk it away, and no one ever thinks about it again. I will keep an eye on its concurrent playercount, but if it doesn’t rise over this weekend, the writing is pretty much on the wall. I think you can make the argument that it already is. It’s not clear what happened here from conception to execution, but perhaps that story will emerge someday.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.