Key Takeaways:
- Multiple Build A Rocket Boy employees have announced their departures on LinkedIn, with HR head Dan Hawkins confirming he’s “seeing BARB through till the very end”
- Kotaku reports sources close to the studio say Build A Rocket Boy is permanently shutting down
- This is at least the fourth wave of layoffs since MindsEye launched in June 2025 — the studio has cut over 400 employees since then
- MindsEye was panned critically, received a 3/10 from GameSpot and a 1-star review from Eurogamer, and had one of the worst launches in gaming history by the studio’s own admission
- Build A Rocket Boy blamed the failure on “organized espionage and corporate sabotage,” released a DLC to prove it, and installed surveillance software on employees’ devices — all of which made things significantly worse
- The studio was founded by GTA veteran Leslie Benzies with over $110 million in funding — it had serious money and pedigree behind it
And just like that, it looks like it’s over. Build A Rocket Boy — the studio founded by former Rockstar North president and GTA veteran Leslie Benzies with more than $110 million in backing — appears to be shutting down for good. After one of the most chaotic and genuinely bewildering sagas in recent gaming industry history, the studio that gave us MindsEye is reportedly done.
What’s Happening Right Now
On September 16, 2026, a wave of Build A Rocket Boy employees announced their departures on LinkedIn — and based on the wording, this isn’t just another round of targeted cuts. Head of audio Stuart Ross, level designer Liam Shannon, release manager Michaela Emslie, lead QA analyst Sandy Greig, QA analyst Elizabet Tyaneva, production QA analyst Cameron Deaves, and a number of other staff all confirmed they were being let go.
But the clearest indicator that this is the end came from BARB’s principal talent acquisition partner Dan Hawkins, who wrote: “With a very heavy heart I raise my green banner, along with the rest of my colleagues at Build A Rocket Boy. I will be seeing BARB through till the very end, helping wrap things up here in the HR department.”
When the HR department is publicly saying they’re helping wrap things up, there’s not much room to read that differently. Sources close to the studio confirmed to Kotaku that Build A Rocket Boy is permanently closing its doors. BARB has not issued any official statement at the time of writing.
The IWGB Games Workers Union vice-chair Ben Newbon also confirmed the situation to Rock Paper Shotgun, expressing “solidarity and support to everyone impacted” while stating the union remains committed to getting justice for workers’ treatment at the studio. He said BARB is “a company that we think has been slowly spiralling for a long time.”
The Full BARB Timeline — How It All Fell Apart
To fully understand how we got here, you have to go back to the beginning — because Build A Rocket Boy’s collapse didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow-motion disaster that played out over more than a year, with each new development somehow worse than the last.
The Ambitious Start
Build A Rocket Boy was founded by Leslie Benzies, the former president of Rockstar North who was heavily involved in producing some of the biggest Grand Theft Auto titles of all time. He was a serious name with serious pedigree, and the studio attracted over $110 million in funding. The original vision was Everywhere — an ambitious make-your-own-game platform with MMO elements, described as something in the space between Roblox and a full AAA game. The project was big, ambitious, and expensive.
Over time, the scope was pulled back considerably, and what emerged instead was MindsEye — a standalone single-player narrative shooter set in a near-future city called Redrock, centered on a protagonist named Jacob Diaz dealing with the side effects of a neural implant and uncovering a conspiracy involving rogue AI and corporate greed. IO Interactive — the studio behind the Hitman series — signed on as publisher through its IOI Partners label.
The Launch From Hell — June 2025
MindsEye launched in June 2025 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, and it went catastrophically wrong almost immediately. The game was broken. Performance issues, bugs, crashes, and countless technical problems made it essentially unplayable for a significant portion of players at launch. PlayStation began approving refunds. The Steam page quickly fell to “Mostly Negative” with over 1,840 user reviews. Eurogamer gave it one star. GameSpot scored it a 3/10, calling it out for a ridiculous story, inconsistent writing, poorly designed mission scenarios, and atrocious combat. The consensus was damning across the board.
Making matters worse, the studio’s Chief Legal Officer and Chief Financial Officer had both quietly left the company the week before the game released — not exactly a vote of confidence from the people who could see the financials up close.
Within weeks of launch, BARB confirmed it had begun the redundancy process. Initial layoffs were expected to affect over 100 employees, with the UK’s statutory 45-day consultation period triggered — which only kicks in when an employer proposes 100 or more redundancies within 90 days. Around 300 UK employees were thought to be at the studio at the time, with another 200 working internationally.
The Sabotage Claims
Rather than directly taking responsibility for the game’s failure — technically or creatively — BARB leadership pointed fingers outward. Co-CEO Mark Gerhard and Leslie Benzies both claimed the disastrous launch was the result of “organized espionage and corporate sabotage” from external parties. Gerhard eventually went on the record saying MindsEye had “without doubt, the worst launch in history” — but in the same breath maintained that the negative reception was at least partially “orchestrated” by outside forces, claiming a campaign funded to the tune of over $1 million by a “very big American company” had been directed to undermine the game.
He claimed evidence had been gathered, investigations conducted, and that authorities in both the UK and US were now handling it. The studio then released a DLC mission called Blacklisted specifically designed to share that evidence with the community. It didn’t land the way the studio hoped, and public opinion barely moved.
Meanwhile, nearly 100 developers and former employees signed an open letter directly to BARB leadership calling them out for causing “pain and stress for your employees” and documenting a culture of burnout, job insecurity, health issues, and “unbearable” levels of overtime in the four months before launch. It was a significant and public rebuke from within.
The Surveillance Scandal — Early 2026
By early 2026, a new controversy erupted. The IWGB Game Workers Union revealed that BARB management had secretly installed invasive surveillance software called Teramind on employees’ work devices — without their knowledge or consent. According to the union, the monitoring went beyond standard productivity tracking and was actually recording workers in their homes. Forty employees filed a grievance demanding the software be removed. It was eventually pulled from devices in March 2026, but the union immediately launched legal action demanding to know exactly what data had been collected and how it was used. BARB never adequately explained itself on any of those points.
Also in March 2026, IO Interactive quietly ended its publishing partnership with Build A Rocket Boy, returning full publishing rights for MindsEye back to the studio. BARB became the sole publisher of its own troubled game — not a great sign.
More Layoffs, a Fan Event, and a Protest
Further layoffs hit in March 2026, and then again in May — an estimated 170 workers in that round alone. In total, estimates suggest BARB laid off over 400 employees between June 2025 and mid-2026 out of a studio that started with roughly 500 people globally.
In July 2026, while all this was unfolding, the studio organized an “all expenses paid” fan event at its Edinburgh offices — flying in MindsEye players, paying for their lodging, and having them playtest the game. Former employees who had been laid off found out about it and organized a protest outside the building with the IWGB. The union’s chair called it “a waste of money, and a kick in the teeth for the fired workers who are seeing fans brought in to do jobs that would otherwise have been theirs.” The optics were genuinely terrible. There was no technical reason to fly people in — online playtesting exists. The decision was baffling.
Leslie Benzies himself was on “temporary leave to recharge” by February 2026, adding to the sense that leadership at the studio was increasingly absent from the situation they’d created.
Could MindsEye Have Recovered? The Cyberpunk Question
It’s worth addressing directly — because some people, including BARB leadership, seemed to genuinely believe it was possible. The comparison to Cyberpunk 2077’s post-launch recovery was floated more than once. CD Projekt Red managed to turn around a catastrophic launch through sustained updates, honest communication, and a genuinely ambitious original game underneath the bugs. Could MindsEye do the same?
The honest answer is probably no — and the difference is fundamental. Cyberpunk 2077 was a deeply ambitious, originally conceived RPG with incredible worldbuilding that had real content worth fixing for. The bugs were a layer on top of something that had genuine creative value underneath. MindsEye’s problems, according to nearly every review, went deeper than technical issues. The story was described as ridiculous, the writing inconsistent, the mission design poorly conceived, and the combat atrocious. There wasn’t a great game hiding beneath the launch bugs — which meant no amount of patching was going to fundamentally change what the game was.
The studio kept the servers online and added updates — the last content update came July 27, 2026, adding a mode called Grenade Football — but the game never recaptured meaningful player attention. Nobody was coming back.
What Happens to the Staff
The hardest part of all of this is what it means for the people on the ground who actually built the game. The open letters, the union actions, the protests — all of it makes clear that the rank-and-file at BARB worked genuinely hard on this project, many of them for years, and were let down by leadership decisions at basically every stage. The mismanagement, the surveillance, the crunch, the public sabotage narrative — these weren’t things the level designers and QA analysts chose. They were the environment those people had to work inside.
The IWGB has confirmed it remains “committed to getting justice” for BARB workers regarding management’s treatment of employees — so there are likely legal proceedings still to come even after the studio’s closure.
For the developers themselves, Edinburgh and the broader UK games industry has real depth of talent, and companies like Rockstar North are right there in Scotland. The workers who came out of this deserve better than the studio they landed in, and most of them will probably land somewhere that recognizes that.
The Bigger Picture for the Games Industry
Build A Rocket Boy’s story is an extreme example of something the industry sees regularly — the gap between ambition, funding, and execution. Over $110 million raised. A founder with one of the most impressive CVs in gaming. A publishing deal with IO Interactive. And still, it ended here.
It’s also a reminder of what happens when crisis management goes sideways. The sabotage narrative, the surveillance scandal, the fan event during layoffs — every one of those choices made things measurably worse and deepened the sense that leadership had lost the plot. At the point where your own HR director is publicly saying he’s helping “wrap things up,” the story is already written.
For the broader gaming landscape, events like this are unfortunately becoming a familiar pattern. The Wardogs crunch controversy showed how studio culture issues can blow up even for successful launches. Build A Rocket Boy shows what that looks like when the launch itself goes wrong too. And while it’s tempting to look at the Black Ops 2 PS5 comeback story as proof that players will reward quality whenever it appears, BARB’s closure is the other side of that coin — what happens when the foundation isn’t there in the first place.
MindsEye’s servers remain online as of this writing. No shutdown date has been announced.
