MindsEye’s PS5 Refunds Place it Among Rare Company

A lot of attention is currently being placed on the recently released MindsEye, with the Build a Rocket Boy title releasing on June 10 across Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and Windows. The widespread discussion around the game is not the kind that the studio would have been hoping for, however, with the unpolished state of the title’s launch leading to a massive amount of criticism from players.

The release of MindsEye is already drawing comparisons to other high-profile titles that have had infamously problematic launches, with this negative attention recently culminating in Sony offering refunds to players who have purchased the game on PlayStation 5. This places MindsEye in an extremely exclusive club that no studio wants to be a part of, with only a select few titles in recent history ever receiving this same refund policy, with even fewer games issuing refunds for the same reasons as MindsEye.

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Sony’s Recent MindsEye Refund Policy is Only Reserved For Exceptional Circumstances

MindsEye drew a lot of attention prior to launch due to its nature as an open-world experience, with some hopeful pre-release discussion around the project labeling it as a GTA clone with sci-fi themes set within a futuristic city. It is clear that Build a Rocket Boy was aiming to make a big splash with the launch of MindsEye, with several high-profile content creators even doing sponsored streams of the project in an attempt to raise its profile.

These sponsored streams only served to put more eyes on the buggy and unoptimized state of the game at launch, with MindsEye even going on to cancel some of these planned streams as a result of negative reception. Other than glaring technical glitches that appear throughout cutscenes and gameplay, MindsEye is being criticized for its poor AI among a spate of other issues, drawing clear comparisons to the earliest days of Cyberpunk 2077.

While Cyberpunk 2077 has gone on to repair its reputation quite impressively, the launch of the game was one of the most controversial the industry has seen, with its own myriad of glitches and performance issues leading to Sony issuing blanket refunds for the game in late 2020. The reasoning behind this form of refund policy is essentially identical to what MindsEye is now going through, with only a few other games facing similar refund approaches for a variety of other reasons.

Only a Few Other Titles Have Necessitated PlayStation Refunds

Concord
Cyberpunk 2077
MindsEye
Bleach Rebirth of Souls

Of course, the short-lived PlayStation exclusive Concord was the recipient of a massive refund policy in September 2024, with the multiplayer project going offline roughly only two weeks after its launch. While the Concord debacle led to widespread refunds, the entire life cycle of the game was completely unprecedented, with the refunds stemming from its essentially immediate cancellation as opposed to the kinds of early performance issues that MindsEye and Cyberpunk 2077 faced.

It is estimated that Concord cost Sony anywhere between $200 million and $400 million across its entire development cycle, making its swift cancellation a completely unprecedented move within the gaming industry.

It is true that other recent titles like Bleach Rebirth of Souls have also led to Sony issuing refunds on request due to technical issues, but no other title comes as close to the widespread performance-related dissatisfaction that the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and MindsEye‘s launches have caused. Sadly, it seems like a much more difficult task for MindsEye to repair its reputation through post-launch updates in the same way 2077 has over the years, yet Build a Rocket Boy has already outlined a plan for urgent updates to the title, hopefully allowing it to somewhat mend the criticism that has surrounded it since its launch on June 10.