MindsEye Developer Build a Rocket Boy Appears to Be Shutting Down After Final Wave of Layoffs

By CriticalPixel · 2026-09-16

Build a Rocket Boy, the Edinburgh studio behind last year's disastrous MindsEye, looks like it has finally run out of runway. A new report from PC Gamer says multiple current and former staff are confirming that the entire remaining team is being made redundant, and the studio itself has not said a word to deny it. After more than a year of layoffs, lawsuits, and a marketing campaign built on blaming saboteurs for its own failures, Build a Rocket Boy appears to be closing for good, and almost nobody in the games industry sounds surprised.

The Layoffs Nobody Is Denying

The clearest signal is coming straight from LinkedIn, where staff are posting the kind of career update nobody wants to write twice in one career. Principal talent acquisition partner Dan Hawkins wrote that he is 'Open to Work' along with the rest of his colleagues, adding that he will be seeing Build a Rocket Boy through to the very end while helping wrap up the HR department. Senior VFX artist Jason Waller was blunter, saying his role is being made redundant along with everybody else left at the studio. Lead weapon and prop artist Adam Ridsdale and former Rockstar audio lead Stuart Ross posted similar messages within hours of each other on the same day.

When four employees across four different departments post the same message within the same afternoon, that is not the vague language of a routine restructuring, that is a staff watching the lights get turned off around them. Hawkins noted that he had helped grow the studio's internal recruitment team from roughly 200 employees to as many as 550 during his five years there, underlining just how far the headcount has fallen since MindsEye shipped. Build a Rocket Boy has not issued any public statement confirming a closure, and PC Gamer says it has reached out to the studio directly for comment.

Screenshot from MindsEye showing a tense third person action sequence

How MindsEye Got Here

MindsEye launched in June 2025 as a third person action thriller led by Leslie Benzies, the former Rockstar North president credited with shepherding the Grand Theft Auto series through its most successful years. The game landed about as roughly as a big budget release can land, with reviewers calling it glitchy and incoherent, and the commercial reception was bad enough that layoffs started almost immediately after launch. Rather than owning the failure, Build a Rocket Boy spent months insisting MindsEye was the victim of a coordinated sabotage campaign, a narrative that eventually drove original publisher IO Interactive to cut ties with the studio and cancel a planned crossover with Hitman entirely.

The studio doubled down instead of walking it back. It shipped a story expansion that promised to reveal evidence of that sabotage and delivered nothing of the sort, drawing ridicule from the same players it was supposedly trying to win back. Axed staff have separately alleged crunch, mismanagement, and a total lack of creative direction, and a workers union has accused the studio of running employee surveillance software that allegedly recorded people inside their own homes. MindsEye is still listed on Steam today, discounted well below its launch price, which has done little to move the needle on a game most players have already written off.

Screenshot from MindsEye showing the game's open city environment

Reaction Has Been Limited but Blunt

Reaction is still thin since the news only broke in the last few hours, so treat any read on the community mood as early. What is out there so far is not sympathetic. One reply under the PC Gamer report simply read 'Finally', and posts spreading the story across social media are framing this as the inevitable ending to a saga that started with a broken launch and got worse with every excuse the studio offered instead of a fix. Nobody has stepped up publicly to defend how Build a Rocket Boy handled the fallout.

The CriticalPixel Take

None of this should surprise anyone who watched Build a Rocket Boy ship a broken game and then choose blaming hackers over fixing it. A studio that reportedly grew to 550 people on the strength of outside backing does not survive a commercial flop stacked on top of a year of self inflicted PR disasters, and insisting the sabotage story was credible only burned the goodwill that might have kept a smaller, humbler studio alive long enough to try again. Benzies built this company on the reputation he earned during Grand Theft Auto's golden years, and if this really is the end, it is closing on a story about surveillance software and a canceled Hitman crossover instead of the ambitious open world game it once promised.

If MindsEye's launch was the warning shot, the wave of LinkedIn posts this week looks like the studio finally taking the hit it spent over a year trying to dodge. Build a Rocket Boy's apparent collapse would land alongside a string of layoffs and closures that have hit both indie and big budget teams across the industry this year. Whether the studio issues any kind of official statement or just quietly disappears, the message from the people who actually worked there is already loud and clear.