MindsEye Developer Reportedly Beginning Mass Layoff Process Potentially Impacting Over 100 Employees [Updated]

Update 24/06/2025: MindsEye developer Build a Rocket Boy has confirmed IGN's report as it has indeed begun the layoff process, though it's still unclear as to how many employees will be impacted.

"We can confirm that we have had to make the painful decision to notify our hardworking team of some internal changes at Build a Rocket Boy," the studio wrote in a statement to IGN.

"While we are working to reassign roles for as many of those impacted by these changes as possible, sadly we are initiating a formal consultation process that may result in redundancies. This decision has not been made lightly, and we are committed to handling this process with transparency, fairness, and respect for all employees. We will provide further details to the team over the coming weeks."

"The launch of MindsEye has been a significant milestone for Build a Rocket Boy, but we know that we still have a lot more to do to grow our community in the coming years. The challenges we've faced have only strengthened our resolve and, while we are deeply saddened by today's decision and thankful to our incredible team, this shift allows us to focus on delivering ongoing updates and performance optimization for MindsEye, while also ensuring the long-term success of Build a Rocket Boy's future ambitions."

Original Story:

Build a Rocket Boy, the studio behind the worst-reviewed game of 2025 so far, MindsEye, has reportedly begun the process of enacting mass layoffs, which could impact at least 100 employees.

According to a report from IGN, a source tells them that it's unclear how many employees will be let go, but the studio began a 45-day consultation period today, on June 23.

Build a Rocket Boy has a main studio based in Edinburgh, Scotland, and under UK law, the 45-day consultation begins when a company plans "100 or more redundancies." IGN adds that Build a Rocket Boy has approximately 300 employees in the UK and another 200 outside the UK. If only 100 people are let go, that's still one-fifth of the studio gone.

To say that MindsEye's launch has gone badly would be an understatement. There were a number of signs before the game launched that things wouldn't be great, with unenthusiastic previews from content creators, negative Glassdoor reviews from former and current staff that described a studio with deep internal turmoil, claims from one of the co-chief executive officers that there was someone paying people to "trash the game and the studio," and two seemingly prescient chief executives who departed the studio a week before the game launched.

Not to mention the fact that physical copies of the game were out ahead of launch, with retail stores breaking MindsEye's street date, and Build a Rocket Boy releasing a statement warning players that those copies were missing "a major" day-one patch, though it wasn't exactly convincing that the patch would fix the issues MindsEye has.

All of this made it no surprise that when MindsEye did eventually launch on June 10, it did so in a broken state. High-end PCs struggled to run the game at all due to its technical issues, while players on PS5 began requesting (and getting) refunds from PlayStation due to the game's poor performance and false advertising, as it was claimed ahead of launch that MindsEye would run at 60 FPS on PS5 Pro. On all consoles, MindsEye is currently capped at 30 FPS.

Two days after the official launch date, the studio published a statement that it was "heartbroken" with how the launch had gone, seeing all the issues players were reporting and the negative feedback the game had received. It promised a series of fixes, two of which have already been released, though even after those hotfixes went live, the technical testing wizards at Digital Foundry reported that MindsEye has "abject technical performance," even with the latest patch.

Build a Rocket Boy has yet to comment on the layoff reports, or release a new statement beyond its latest hotfix last week. The studio did also deny that it was using bots to reply positively to negative reviews, a claim that was brought up after a few people online noticed some similar wording in posts claiming that MindsEye gave players "goosebumps," or that they had only experienced a few bugs, and that the game reminded them of Cyberpunk 2077.

It's unclear where MindsEye sits in the sales charts, but with layoffs already on the table, it's likely that it underperformed, to say the least, which brings into question whether Build a Rocket Boy will deliver on any of its post-launch plans for MindsEye.

MindsEye's poor launch also brings into question what will happen with what was supposed to be Build a Rocket Boy's flagship product, Everywhere. MindsEye was originally billed as a premium experience players could play within Everywhere, which itself is meant to be this massive platform through which players could make their own creations and play games made by Build a Rocket Boy, similar to what Epic has built with Fortnite.

That plan was later changed, with MindsEye being a standalone release, and Build a Rocket Boy having to put out a statement that Everywhere had not been "abandoned." Now, however, it could likely be abandoned, since we don't even know if Build a Rocket Boy will be around long enough to make it.

This is just speculation, but it seems like MindsEye was meant to be a sort of proof-of-concept for the creation platform that Build a Rocket Boy envisioned Everywhere to be. If MindsEye had been a massive success, that would be the foundation for building out Everywhere, and the ultimate showcase for what's possible in the platform Build a Rocket Boy were creating. You could say MindsEye's success was meant to be the fuel for the rocket that would be Everywhere.

If that was the plan, it seems fair to say that it has failed, at least for now. Who knows, this could still potentially be the beginning of MindsEye's own arc where Build a Rocket Boy patches it into an entirely different game, something that players actually like and want to play.

Or, these layoffs, should they be confirmed, could be the beginning of the story players are more familiar with, the one where, within a year's time, Build a Rocket Boy is another shuttered studio.

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