400 Staff Cut, Now MindsEye Flies Fans In for Free

Over 400 people lost their jobs at Build a Rocket Boy in the span of a year. Now the studio is paying for flights, hotel rooms, and a meet-and-greet so a handful of fans can come play MindsEye at its Edinburgh offices this Saturday. Workers and union members plan to be waiting outside when they arrive.

The protest, first reported by Eurogamer, will see current and former BARB employees gather at 10am outside the studio's Edinburgh headquarters on 11th July, joined by representatives from the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and other unions. Their target is an "all-expenses-paid" community playtest that covers return flights to Scotland and two nights of accommodation for attendees, who will test an updated build of MindsEye with new features. Build a Rocket Boy announced the event on its Discord back in June.

I've covered a lot of layoff stories this year. Studios cutting staff after a game underperforms, publishers trimming headcount to hit quarterly targets, the usual grim parade. But I don't think I've seen anything quite like a company laying off 400 people across three rounds and then bankrolling a fan holiday to the same offices those people used to work in. The sheer disconnect between those two decisions is staggering.

Three Rounds in Under a Year

MindsEye launched in summer 2025 to a Metacritic score of 37, making it the worst-reviewed game of the year. Shortly after release, over 100 employees were let go. A second round hit in March 2026 after a major update shipped. Then in May, another 170 people were cut right after the studio released a new campaign mission, one that was built around depicting alleged sabotage against the game's development. Studio founder Leslie Benzies and co-CEO Mark Gerhard had publicly claimed "organised espionage and corporate sabotage" were responsible for MindsEye's reception, rather than the game itself being broken at launch.

The IWGB's involvement goes beyond the protest. The union initiated legal action against Build a Rocket Boy in April after discovering that Teramind, employee monitoring software capable of keystroke logging and email tracking, had been installed on worker devices without their knowledge. The software has since been removed, but the legal proceedings continue. In October 2025, 93 current and former employees signed an open letter calling out studio leadership over what they described as "longstanding disrespect and mistreatment."

What makes the fan event especially pointed, according to the IWGB, is what attendees will actually be doing there. The union alleges the playtest will see community members performing testing duties normally handled by professional staff. It also claims the studio recently cut longstanding community team members and replaced one with a player, with no formal interview process or role advertisement. Paying to fly in volunteers to do work your laid-off employees used to do professionally is a specific kind of insult, and I think the workers protesting it have every right to be furious.

MindsEye currently sits at a 33 on OpenCritic and still carries a $35 price tag on the PlayStation Store despite its minuscule player base. IO Interactive Partners concluded its publishing agreement with Build a Rocket Boy back in March. The game has received updates since launch, but nothing that has shifted its critical or commercial trajectory in any measurable way.

Build a Rocket Boy has not commented on the planned demonstration. The protest is set for 10am Saturday outside the Edinburgh offices, and the IWGB says it expects members of the wider public to attend alongside union representatives. If the studio believes an updated build of MindsEye is strong enough to win people over, flying in a dozen fans to play it while former employees picket outside is probably the worst possible way to prove it.