MindsEye Studio Blames Sabotage, Then Fires 170

"The development staff did all that they could and tried their hardest to make it something very, very special. We would in no way try to sabotage or bring down the company."

That's Chris Wilson, an ex-lead animator on MindsEye, pushing back against the narrative his former employer has been selling for months. It's a quote that hits differently now that Build A Rocket Boy has reportedly gutted roughly 170 of its remaining 250 staff, according to sources cited by Kotaku. If accurate, that leaves the studio with approximately 80 people, down from the hundreds who once worked on what was supposed to be the next great open-world game.

This is the third round of layoffs at Build A Rocket Boy in under a year. Multiple former employees have confirmed their departures on LinkedIn, including technical level designer James Tyler, who only joined the studio in February, and audio designer Tom Cross. QA analysts, level designers, community managers, the social team; entire departments appear to have been hollowed out. Members of the social media team shared the news directly with the MindsEye community on Discord, saying their work would end this week. Build A Rocket Boy has not publicly acknowledged the layoffs.

The Sabotage Storyline

What makes this situation so bizarre is the timeline. On April 28, just days before these layoffs reportedly began, Build A Rocket Boy released MindsEye Update 7.1, which added a new mode called Blacklisted. This was the update CEO Mark Gerhard had been teasing for weeks, one that would supposedly "share some of the evidence of the sabotage with the community." Blacklisted is a short story campaign inspired by what BARB claims were real-life attacks against the studio and its game.

Gerhard has been pushing this conspiracy angle hard. During the March layoffs, he stated the studio had uncovered "overwhelming evidence of organized espionage and corporate sabotage affecting MindsEye" and that the matter was "moving toward prosecution." He's also claimed BARB was targeted by a million-dollar smear campaign run by an influencer management agency. None of this evidence has been shared publicly in any verifiable form.

I find it difficult to square the management's version of events with what's actually happening. If you have overwhelming evidence of criminal sabotage that destroyed your product, you take it to court. You don't turn it into a DLC mission and then fire two-thirds of your workforce. The disconnect between "we were sabotaged by outside forces" and "we're laying off 170 people because the game failed commercially" is staggering. One of those narratives has to give, and the layoffs suggest which one reality is choosing.

The situation got even stranger in late April when Build A Rocket Boy staff launched legal proceedings against the studio itself, claiming management had surveilled employees using Teramind AI software without properly disclosing what data was collected or how it was stored. So the studio that accused outsiders of espionage is now being accused of surveilling its own people.

MindsEye launched on June 10, 2025, and landed a 39 on Metacritic for PC, making it one of the worst-reviewed games of that year. Its original publisher, IO Interactive, exited the publishing deal in March and cancelled a planned Hitman crossover DLC. Steam reviews have shifted to Mostly Positive in recent months, suggesting the game has improved for the players who stuck around, but that recovery clearly hasn't translated into enough revenue to sustain the studio.

Build A Rocket Boy was founded in 2016 by Leslie Benzies, the former Rockstar Games executive who served as president of Rockstar North during the development of several Grand Theft Auto titles. That pedigree generated enormous expectations for MindsEye, expectations the game spectacularly failed to meet. Benzies serves as co-CEO alongside Gerhard, though it's Gerhard who has been the public face of the sabotage claims.

What's left now is a studio of roughly 80 people, a game with a toxic reputation, no publisher, and a leadership team that spent months building an in-game monument to a conspiracy theory instead of addressing the far more mundane reasons MindsEye struggled. The 170 people who lost their jobs this week deserve better than that. Several of them, like James Tyler, had been at the studio for only a few months before being cut loose.