7 December 2025

This 2025 Failure Proves You Shouldn’t Try and Compete with Grand Theft Auto

By newsgame

After over a decade since its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto 6 will finally release in the fall of 2026. It’s been a long wait for fans of the open-world crime game, but Rockstar Games loves to take its time. And that wait hasn’t been any easier with so few titles that occupy the same space as GTA. Some have tried, but none have come close.

Perhaps the biggest challenger to Grand Theft Auto’s throne was MindsEye, the third-person action-adventure title from Build a Rocket Boy. For a lot of different reasons, many Grand Theft Auto fans thought that MindsEye would be, at the very least, a competitor to GTA, but instead, it was an absolute disaster of a release.

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The MindsEye/Grand Theft Auto comparison starts at the top, with Leslie Benzies. Benzies was producer on the Grand Theft Auto series, starting with GTA 3 through to Grand Theft Auto 5. Given his pedigree, when Benzies started up Build a Rocket Boy and announced Everywhere, an MMO/game platform, the expectation was that he was trying to one-up Grand Theft Auto. Within Everywhere, players would experience different districts that captured gameplay from racing to combat, similar aspects that you could see in any Grand Theft Auto title. It would be mostly user-generated, but the potential was there. But first, Build a Rocket Boy needed to prove the concept, and thus MindsEye was born.

As more and more of MindsEye was revealed, the question marks started appearing. First, there was clarification that the game would not be open world, which, admittedly, was a presumption on the part of fans, but given Benzies’ past work was a reasonable assumption. Then, there was the distancing of the game from any GTA connections in interviews with Benzies leading up to launch. And finally, the lack of early reviews called into question the game’s quality. Early review copies aren’t a guarantee by any means, but when no outlet has access to a game early, that’s not a good sign.

MindsEye is, quite frankly, a half-baked game that the developers tried to salvage initially but eventually gave up on. There is a kernel of a compelling idea somewhere with MindsEye, and Everywhere, but the developers either didn’t have the resources to deliver on its ambition or the ambition was so large that it was impossible to get any one thing right.

What initially could have been a Grand Theft Auto competitor instead was a colossal failure, made even worse by reports from Build a Rocket Boy’s developers. There were claims of leadership problems in an open letter from devs, as well as layoffs at the studio following its release. Apparently, the experience of publishing MindsEye was so bad that IO Interactive doubts that it will publish another studio’s game ever again. MindsEye sits firmly as one of the most disappointing games of 2025, and it is unlikely that Everywhere will ever see the light of day.

There have been some excellent Grand Theft Auto competitors/clones/whatever you want to call them. Saints Row developed a fan base all its own, but the most recent entry tried to reboot the series by taking it in a direction that didn’t seem to resonate with fans, and developer Volition was closed down a year later. The True Crime series also had its fair share of fans, but couldn’t get a foothold after two entries (one set in New York and one set in LA).

Sleeping Dogs, Watch Dogs, The Godfather, Driver – there have been quite a few games that have tried to siphon even a small percentage of the Grand Theft Auto fan base. And while some have found success, they haven’t had the staying power that Rockstar Games’ series has. With Benzies at the helm, it seemed like MindsEye could have been a game more ambitious than anything GTA had ever done, but instead those ambitions got the best of Build a Rocket Boy.