Build a Rocket Boy is hosting an all-expenses paid MindsEye event at its Edinburgh offices this Saturday. Flights to Scotland, two nights of hotel accommodation, and meet and greets with studio staff – all paid for by a company that has laid off more than 400 workers in three separate rounds of layoffs in less than a year. Workers and members of the IWGB union will gather outside the building at 10am to clarify what they think of the decision.
The situation is, by any measure, unusual. MindsEye launched in the summer of 2025 as Metacritic’s worst reviewed game of the year, scoring 37 and arriving in a state described by critics and players alike as broken.
What They’re Really Opposing The Workers
More than 100 employees were let go shortly after the launch. A second round followed in March 2026, with CEO Mark Gerhard citing “irrefutable evidence” of organized espionage and corporate sabotage as the explanation for the game’s acceptance. The third round came in May, cutting another 170 people just after the studio sent out a new campaign — a campaign built around showing the alleged vandalism. Leslie Benzies, the studio’s founder and former president of Rockstar North, left the company at the same time under circumstances that were publicly described as a short planned hiatus.
This fan event is not done alone in all of this, which is the point the staff is making. Spending money on flights and hotel rooms for members of the public while more than 400 of their colleagues lost their lives is a direct decision that the workers are challenging.
There is also the question of what the fans will be doing when they get there. The IWGB noted in its statement that the playtest will see members of the public perform testing tasks normally performed by professional staff, and that the recent decision to terminate longtime team members was followed by hiring a player without a formal interview process or advertising for the role. Whether that’s a common practice or not, it doesn’t look good framed by last year’s rear.
MindsEye launched in the summer of 2025 as Metacritic’s worst reviewed game of the year
The IWGB is already in the midst of legal action against Build a Rocket Boy separately. Earlier this year, the union launched a lawsuit after discovering that Teramind — employee monitoring software capable of key logging, email monitoring, and file tracking — had been installed on employees’ devices without their knowledge. According to the former lead actor of the film Build a Rocket Boy, the blatant disrespect of the workers and the dishonesty of the guards was “the nail in the coffin.” The software has been removed, but the legal process is ongoing.
A year that was hard to explain
Before MindsEye launched, there were signs that things weren’t going well – negative previews, two executives leaving two weeks before release, and early-leaking portable copies with players posting patches for severe technical issues. The ensuing vandalism story added to the confusion.
An internal meeting reportedly saw Benzies present what he described as evidence of a concerted campaign against the studio, before reading a hate email from his personal email for ten minutes. 93 current and former employees signed an open letter in October 2025 calling out the studio’s leadership directly, saying “these layoffs happened because you repeatedly refused to listen to the years of experience of your employees.”
The fan event this weekend is Build Rocket Boy’s attempt to build momentum for the updated MindsEye design. Whether that is a sound business decision or a vocal disagreement in the context of all that has happened is the question the protest is designed to publicly answer. The studio did not comment on the planned show. The IWGB will be joined by members of other unions and “the public at large.” Ten o’clock on a Saturday morning, outside the Edinburgh offices.
- Released
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June 10, 2025
- The ESRB
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M For Adults 17+ // Blood, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Violence
- Engineer(s).
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Build a Rocket Boy
- Publisher
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IO Interactive Partners A/S
