Nine days after we reported that Build a Rocket Boy’s own HR staff were “seeing BARB through till the very end,” the studio has made it official. A Companies House filing shows the MindsEye developer entered administration on September 23, 2026, with a formal appointment notice filed on September 25. What had been read as a slow-motion wind-down is now a legal insolvency process, with outside administrators in charge of what’s left of the company.

Who’s running the company now

The filing names Allister Manson of Opus Restructuring LLP and Mark Harper as the administrators handling Build a Rocket Boy’s affairs. Administration is a formal UK insolvency procedure distinct from simply closing up shop: once appointed, administrators take legal control of the company, and their job is to work out whether any part of the business — its remaining staff, its unreleased projects, its assets — can be rescued, sold, or must be wound down entirely. That decision is now out of co-CEOs Leslie Benzies and Mark Gerhard’s hands.

The studio’s most recent accounts, cited in the filing, put the scale of the problem in numbers for the first time: a £47.5 million operating loss, a £36.2 million net loss, and £61.8 million owed to creditors. Those figures explain why four rounds of layoffs in fifteen months — including the roughly 170 jobs cut earlier this month, which left the Edinburgh studio at an estimated 80 employees — were never going to be enough on their own.

The wreckage of one launch

Build a Rocket Boy was founded by Leslie Benzies, the former Rockstar North president who produced Grand Theft Auto games from GTA III through GTA Online, and it raised roughly $110 million to build MindsEye alongside two other unreleased projects, Everywhere and Arcadia. MindsEye launched in June 2025 to some of the worst reviews of any major release that year — reviewers cited broken AI, thin missions, and constant crashes — and its publisher, IO Interactive, has since ended the partnership. Neither Everywhere nor Arcadia has shipped, and there’s no indication either project survives administration in any recognizable form.

A legal fight that outlasted the layoffs

Administration doesn’t erase the studio’s other unresolved problems. The IWGB Game Workers union has separate legal action pending against Build a Rocket Boy over Teramind, monitoring software that co-CEOs Gerhard and Benzies confirmed was installed on employee devices without their knowledge, tracking keystrokes, screen activity, and microphone audio. The union says the software was pulled in March only after 40 employees filed a formal grievance. Around the same time, Benzies and Gerhard were publicly floating claims of sabotage and “internal saboteurs” among the workforce — allegations staff have disputed, saying the only surveillance came from the top down. It’s unclear how, or whether, that legal action proceeds against a company now in administration.

Why this matters beyond one studio

Administration is the point at which a struggling studio’s fate stops being a matter of press releases and LinkedIn posts and becomes a matter of law. Creditors, not co-founders, now have the loudest voice in what happens to Build a Rocket Boy’s remaining assets and any of its roughly 80 staff. It also closes the loop on one of the more extreme examples of this year’s pattern: a studio with real money, a marquee founder, and a AAA publishing partner still couldn’t survive a single failed launch, and the compressed timeline — from release to layoffs to insolvency in fifteen months — has become a template other struggling studios are now tracking uncomfortably closely.

Benzies himself has been absent from the company’s public response for months, having taken a “temporary leave to recharge” earlier this year. Gerhard has not commented on the administration filing, and Opus Restructuring has not yet indicated whether it expects to sell any part of the business or proceed straight to liquidation.

For the layoffs and warning signs that led here, see our earlier coverage of Build a Rocket Boy’s latest round of cuts, and for another studio that couldn’t outlast a single bad year, read about Polyarc’s shutdown after Moss failed to find new funding.