MindsEye Developer Loses 170 Staff in Massive Third Round of Layoffs
- Sagar Mankar
- 8 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Build A Rocket Boy (BARB), the developer behind MindsEye, has laid off roughly 170 employees in its latest round of cuts, leaving the studio with around 80 staff members.
That is a steep drop from the 250 people who were on board before the layoffs. According to Kotaku, two separate sources confirmed the scale of this round of redundancies. Several affected employees have already gone public with the news, sharing their departures on LinkedIn and Discord in the days following the cuts.
Among those who confirmed their exits were James Tyler (Technical Level Designer), Tom Cross (Audio Designer), Gary Iain Gough (QA Analyst), and Leah Philpot (Level Designer).
The social media team at Build A Rocket Boy also broke the news directly to the game's community on the MindsEye Discord server. Digital Marketing Manager George Jons-Clothier wrote, "Just popping in to share that tomorrow (May 5th) will be my last working day with BARB. It has been an absolute pleasure and a genuine honor to be part of this community. You folks are some of the kindest, most welcoming, talented, and passionate people I've ever had the privilege of knowing and have made every day working on MindsEye feel meaningful and fun."
This is the third time in roughly a year that the studio has gone through layoffs. Build A Rocket Boy France was shut down in March of this year, and additional cuts had already taken place mid-2025 following the troubled launch of MindsEye.
The game, released last year, was one of the worst-reviewed titles of 2025, falling short of the considerable expectations that had built up around it. Co-CEO Mark Gerhard, however, has consistently pushed back on the idea that the game's failure had anything to do with its development or quality. He has pointed to what he describes as "organized espionage and corporate sabotage" as the root cause, a claim that most in the gaming community have found difficult to take seriously.
Gerhard even suggested at one point that a future update for the game would include characters modeled after former employees he believed were behind the alleged sabotage.
Meanwhile, the situation inside the studio had reportedly been difficult for some time. In April, the IWGB Game Workers Union filed legal action on behalf of Build A Rocket Boy developers, accusing the company of installing surveillance software on employees' devices without their knowledge or consent. Prior to that, workers had published an open letter describing conditions as "unbearable," pointing to excessive crunch time and what they called a "lack of transparency and communication" from leadership.
As per reports, the studio had put out a roadmap to address MindsEye's various issues, and there was talk of pulling off a Cyberpunk 2077-style turnaround for the game. But the most recent Blacklist update left players unimpressed, making that path forward look increasingly uncertain. The original vision for Build A Rocket Boy had been far grander, with MindsEye intended to be just one part of a larger user-generated content platform called "Everywhere," described as a high-graphical-fidelity virtual world. At this point, that ambition feels distant.
IO Interactive initially distributed MindsEye but recently backed out, and since then, BARB has taken full publishing responsibility for the game. The Hitman DLC was also canceled.
Build A Rocket Boy was founded in 2016 by Leslie Benzies, a former Rockstar Games executive who had a major hand in building the Grand Theft Auto franchise. That history gave MindsEye a lot of pre-release excitement. Unfortunately, the game never lived up to it.