Gaming Industry / May 2026

Build a Rocket Boy has laid off another 170 people. That's the third round in twelve months. The studio is down to roughly 80 employees from 250 before this wave of cuts.

The company hasn't announced anything publicly. Employees found out through individual notices, and now they're announcing their departures on LinkedIn. You see the names: James Tyler (Technical Level Designer), Tom Cross (Audio Designer), Gary Iain Gough (QA), Leah Philpot (Level Designer). People with specific jobs who are now looking for work.

On the MindsEye Discord, several community team members posted about their last days. George Jons-Clothier, who was Digital Marketing Manager, wrote: "Just popping in to share that tomorrow will be my last working day with BARB. It has been an absolute pleasure and a genuine honor to be part of this community."

Jons-Clothier spent the last year building community around a game that's currently running at 11 concurrent players on Steam. The Discord channel he was thanking is mostly empty now, and has been for months.

Timeline

June 2025: MindsEye launched with a Metacritic score of 28/100. PlayStation started issuing refunds within days. Within a month, the game bottomed out below 20 concurrent players.

Internally, the studio had projected 500,000 PC sales. Actual figures were around 160,000 across all platforms—roughly $8 to $10 million in revenue. The project had consumed £233 million.

July 2025: Nearly 300 employees got redundancy notices. Around 75% of the studio in one round.

October 2025: 93 former employees published an open letter. They described the workplace as having "unsustainable crunch," systematic mismanagement, and a culture where "employees were expendable resources rather than valued collaborators." The IWGB Game Workers Union filed legal action.

January 2026: In an internal meeting, co-CEO Mark Gerhard told staff they'd identified people behind an alleged €1 million sabotage campaign. No arrests followed. No court filings. No public presentation of evidence.

March 2026: Second round of layoffs. BARB France was shut entirely. IO Interactive ended the publishing deal. The Hitman crossover was cancelled.

April 2026: The IWGB filed over surveillance software found on employee home computers. Teramind, the software was called. It captured keystrokes, screen activity, and microphone audio without disclosure. BARB never explained what was collected or why it was running.

May 2026: 170 people out. About 80 remain.

The Sabotage Narrative

In May, co-CEO Mark Gerhard posted on LinkedIn that this latest round was due to "organized espionage and corporate sabotage."

This is the explanation being given for layoffs at a studio whose game is currently at 11 concurrent players, whose publisher left, and whose employees sued over secret surveillance software installed on home computers.

The Blacklisted DLC was reviewed by PC Gamer: "a short, dull mission utterly lacking even the unintentional charm of the base game." The Arcadia platform for user-generated content has generated neither content nor users.

When BBC and Decode independently interviewed current and former staff, the descriptions were consistent. One developer told the BBC: "There was never a clear vision. Leadership was reactive, not strategic. We built what we were told to build without understanding why." Another said: "The game was released because of a deadline, not because it was finished."

Fourteen people across two independent investigations described structural problems at the studio level. No mention of external sabotage. No reference to coordinated campaigns.

And yet. No arrests in twelve months. No lawsuits with presented evidence. No named defendants in court filings.

What Happened

The IWGB's statement was direct: "Staff felt used and discarded by leaders who refused to accept responsibility for the project's failure. Workers were blamed for outcomes determined by decisions made in the executive suite."

A £233 million project without clear direction, managed by someone who didn't take developer feedback seriously, shipped too early, and then spent a year attributing every problem to external conspiracy rather than internal decisions.

Leslie Benzies spent more to make MindsEye than Rockstar spent making GTA V. GTA V has generated over $8 billion in revenue. MindsEye generated roughly $10 million. That outcome difference has causes. They are visible in the development timeline, the leadership decisions, and the inability to adjust course when the game wasn't working.

IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak released a statement: "Those guys were working really hard and it didn't pan out how they expected, and how we wished either." He didn't elaborate on IO's departure.

What Happens Now

Eighty people remain at the studio. The community team that posted their goodbyes is no longer there. The QA staff, the level designers, the audio team—gone.

BARB has described the current status as a "reset" and entering "a new phase of ongoing development." With 80 people, no publisher, a game at 11 concurrent players, and three separate legal proceedings running simultaneously, the path forward isn't immediately clear from publicly available information.

The studio will either stabilize around some smaller scope, wind down operations, or find a new direction. What that looks like remains to be seen.

I've written a lot about Benzies and Build a Rocket Boy over the past year. The surveillance software scandal. The sabotage claims. The layoffs. The studio implosion. At some point this stops feeling like reporting on a specific crisis and starts feeling like covering a content machine—documenting the incremental death of something expensive and broken. And there's another studio doing the same thing somewhere else right now. And there will be another one next quarter. This is just the industry now.

Sources: Kotaku (primary reporting on layoffs, May 5 2026), GameSpot, PC Gamer, The Gamer, GamesIndustry.biz, Gamereactor. Employee statements via LinkedIn and MindsEye Discord confirmed. BARB did not respond to media requests for comment. All prior reporting on BARB surveillance lawsuit, redundancy legal action, and sabotage claims drawn from IWGB press releases, BBC investigative reporting, Insider Gaming, and Decode employee interviews.