If, like me, you ended up keeping a bit of an eye on MindsEye once its release popped into view like a weird mind portal, you might remember one of the execs behind it causing a fuss with some Discord comments alleging bots were being used to bad mouth the game.
Well, in a twist that’d be strange for other games, but feels pretty par the course for this one, developer Build A Rocket Boy’s now denied that it’s been using bots to say nice things about MindsEye. This wasn’t totally out of the blue. Some folks had spotted some posts about the game with suspiciously similar wording.
“Taking a minute to set the record straight and refute this, and other false claims that are swirling,” the studio tweeted in response to a thread that saw journos Mike Channell and Kirk McKeand highlight some examples of potentially botty MindsEye posting.
“BARB has never used any bots nor will we. We’re pumped to see players loving the latest MindsEye update! #NoBots”. Cor, a hashtag and everything.
As a, well, a social media weirdness masochist for lack of a better term, I decided to look into the examples cited by Channell and McKeand myself. I also quickly checked to see if I could find more examples of multiple posts about MindsEye that use weirdly similar language – such as all insisting that the game’s given them goosebumps, before casually listing the different systems you can play it on in a manner that’s not at all sales-pitchy.
Quick scans through the comments and Twitter replies on IGN and Eurogamer‘s MindsEye reviews – with two comments that are exactly the same left in the Facebook comments on the latter having kicked off Channell’s thread – didn’t reveal anything I’d class as sticking out beyond the norms I’d expect from your average internet comments section.
Looking into the post histories of the accounts in the goosebumps-citing post chain McKeand shared a screenshot of, I did find that two of them have only existed since April this year, and that the former also retweeted one of the latter’s weird MindsEye posts.
Meanwhile, one put out four very similar and very promo-y posts about Mindseye across June 11th and 12th alone, all of which hype it up and mention the platforms it’s available on. It even retweeted one of them in that same timeframe.
Based on the few examples I looked at, I’d say this feels like it could pretty easily just be your standard weird engagement-farming bot activity done in isolation, rather than the potential astroturfing suggested in the original thread. And again, BARB have denied it.
