Several employees have said they’re leaving the studio.
Build A Rocket Boy
Build A Rocket Boy (BARB), the developer of the widely maligned action-adventure game MindsEye, appears to be shutting down. Several employees wrote on LinkedIn that their time at the studio is “coming to an end,” and Kotaku reported that BARB is set to close its doors for good.
“With a very heavy heart I raise my green banner, along with the rest of my colleagues at Build a Rocket Boy. I am ‘Open to Work’ actively looking for a new adventure,” BARB’s principal talent acquisition partner Dan Hawkins wrote, implying that all of the studio’s employees are out of a job. “I will be seeing BARB through till the very end, helping wrap things up here in the HR department.”
MindsEye had a disastrous debut in June 2025, with PlayStation said to have issued refunds to some players who checked out the game in its initial bug-riddled state. A round of layoffs followed soon after the Grand Theft Auto-esque game’s release while BARB founder (and former GTA producer) Leslie Benzies reportedly blamed its woes on “saboteurs” inside and outside the company.
The studio released an expansion for MindsEye this spring. It contained a mission it claimed would expose some evidence of the purported conspiracy that ruined the game’s chances for success. This had no juicy details about said “scandal” and was just a humdrum riff on a Hitman mission, according to Rock Paper Shotgun. The addition of multiplayer and a Rocket League-esque soccer mode this summer didn’t exactly turn around MindsEye‘s fortunes either.
BARB became the sole publisher of MindsEye in March after parting ways with IOI Partners, an arm of 007 First Light developer IO Interactive. Further rounds of layoffs took place that month and in May.
Earlier this year, dozens of employees accused the studio of spying on them. According to the IWGB Game Workers Union, BARB “management installed invasive Teramind surveillance software onto their devices without their knowledge” and went beyond “monitoring workers’ productivity or safeguarding the company’s security by recording individuals in their homes and without their consent.”
