Build a Rocket Boy, the Edinburgh studio behind last year’s disastrous MindsEye launch, has cut roughly 170 more jobs, according to affected staff posting on LinkedIn this week. That leaves the studio at an estimated 80 employees — down from a reported peak of more than 800 — and this time, the language coming out of the company sounds less like a restructuring and more like a wind-down.

An HR executive says she’s “seeing BARB through till the very end”

The clearest signal came from Dan Hawkins, a principal talent acquisition partner at Build a Rocket Boy, who wrote on LinkedIn that they would be “seeing BARB through till the very end,” helping “wrap things up here in the HR department.” That’s not the language studios use when they expect to keep operating. Build a Rocket Boy hasn’t issued a public statement confirming a full closure, but the framing from its own HR staff, combined with a headcount that has fallen by roughly 90% from its high point, has left little ambiguity about where things are headed.

This is now the fourth known round of cuts at the studio in just over a year. Build a Rocket Boy laid off between 250 and 300 people — most of them in Edinburgh — within two weeks of MindsEye’s June 2025 launch. Further layoffs followed in March and May of this year, each one trimming the survivors down further. Co-CEO Mark Gerhard had said earlier this year that the team was down to around 240 people from its peak; this latest cut removes roughly two-thirds of even that reduced staff.

A troubled game from a Rockstar veteran

Build a Rocket Boy was founded by Leslie Benzies, the former president of Rockstar North who served as lead producer on Grand Theft Auto games from GTA III through GTA V and GTA Online. After leaving Rockstar, Benzies raised roughly $110 million to build the studio’s ambitious slate: MindsEye, a single-player action title; Everywhere, an “immersive platform”; and Arcadia, a set of user-generated content tools.

MindsEye, published by IO Interactive, launched on June 10, 2025, to some of the worst reviews of any major release that year. Critics pointed to inconsistent AI behavior, uninspired mission design, frequent crashes, and rough technical performance across PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC. Player counts on Steam stayed minimal, refund requests piled up, and the game quickly earned a reputation as one of 2025’s biggest launch failures — despite, by some accounts, months of mandatory crunch in the run-up to release. IO Interactive has since ended its publishing arrangement with the studio.

Benzies himself has been absent from the fallout for months. He took what the company called a “temporary leave to recharge” earlier this year, a departure that came alongside separate, unrelated allegations resurfacing against him, which he has denied. Gerhard has been the public face of the company since.

A familiar pattern, compressed into one bad year

Studio collapses in games usually unfold slowly — a quiet round of cuts, a delay, another round, then silence. Build a Rocket Boy has run through that entire cycle in about fifteen months, and the compression is what makes it notable: a well-funded studio led by an industry veteran with a marquee résumé, backed by more than $100 million and a AAA publisher, still couldn’t survive one bad launch. That’s a sharper version of a trend that’s shown up repeatedly this year, where studios with real money and real pedigree behind them have folded anyway once a flagship release failed to land.

It’s also a reminder of how much weight gets placed on a single title when a studio has nothing else shipping. MindsEye was Build a Rocket Boy’s first release after years of development, and its failure left the company with no revenue cushion to absorb the blow. Everywhere and Arcadia, the studio’s other announced projects, appear to have quietly stalled along with everything else — there’s been no recent word on either.

What happens now

Build a Rocket Boy hasn’t confirmed a closure date or detailed severance for the latest round of departures, and the roughly 80 people still there haven’t said publicly what, if anything, they’re currently working on. Given the trajectory — four rounds of layoffs, a departed founder, a lost publishing partner, and HR staff describing their own job as closing the place down — an official end looks like a matter of when, not if.

For more on how a single failed launch can unravel a studio, see our coverage of Polyarc’s shutdown after Moss failed to secure new funding, and for the wider financial pressure hitting narrative-driven developers this year, read about Dontnod’s going-concern warning after Tencent pulled its funding.