MindsEye Update 8 adds multiplayer and grenade football to a game almost nobody is playing

Build a Rocket Boy has pushed Update 8 for MindsEye, calling it "one of the biggest yet" — but with a peak of 36 concurrent players in the last 24 hours, the audience for all this new content is vanishingly small.

The headline addition is multiplayer, specifically a team-based mode called grenade football. It's essentially Rocket League without the cars: players in red or blue jumpsuits run around a pitch and blast a giant ball into each other's nets using grenade launchers. A gameplay video shows it looking rough — the ball visibly disappears into the launcher when collected, making it hard to track possession. Beyond grenade football, Update 8 also adds extra racing circuits, social features for player interaction, and a round of singleplayer improvements. Those include better enemy physics on explosion hits, difficulty tweaks across various missions, an AI pathing and behaviour overhaul, improved vehicle handling, and smoother animation transitions between movement, combat, and interactions.

MindsEye launched to a poor reception earlier this year, and things have only gotten messier since. IO Interactive dropped its publishing deal with developer Build a Rocket Boy, the studio has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs, executives have made headlines for wild public statements, and former employees have alleged that spy software was covertly installed on their work machines. Earlier this month, former developers protested outside a fan event held at the studio, with the Independent Workers of Great Britain Union accusing BARB of offloading paid and unpaid work onto fans during a broader games industry jobs crisis.

The singleplayer fixes are arguably the most meaningful part of Update 8 — a functional open-world shooter campaign would at least give the game a reason to exist. The multiplayer push is harder to take seriously at 36 peak players, and Rematch, the dedicated grenade-football-adjacent competition, has little to fear. Whether BARB can stabilise the game — and the studio — remains an open question.