A studio does not usually die in one clean headline. It goes in instalments,
and this week Build a Rocket Boy quietly ran out of them.
The studio behind MindsEye, the GTA-shaped game that landed in 2025 as one of
the worst-reviewed things anyone shipped that year, appears to be closing for
good. Staff started posting the goodbyes on LinkedIn on 16 September, the kind
of posts that always use the same brave, careful language, and if you have
followed this saga for the last fourteen months you already knew the shape of
it before you read the words.
Because this is not a sudden collapse. That is the part worth sitting with.
Roll it back. Around 300 people were let go in July 2025, weeks after MindsEye
face-planted. Then another round in March 2026. Then more in May. Every few
months, another slice, until there was not enough studio left to slice. By the
time the final redundancies hit this week, one worker described it plainly as
“the very end,” and it is hard to argue with the framing. You cannot bleed a
place this slowly and call the last cut a surprise.
The name on the door is Leslie Benzies, and that is why any of us are paying
attention. This is the former president of Rockstar North, one of the central
figures behind the GTA games a huge number of us grew up on. Build a Rocket
Boy was supposed to be the next act. Instead, when MindsEye cratered, Benzies
reportedly pinned the disaster on “internal and external saboteurs,” which is
a remarkable sentence to say out loud about a game that mostly just did not
work when people pressed the buttons.
We want to be careful here, because it is easy to make this a punchline. The
reviews were the punchline. The people are not. Somewhere in the wreckage of a
bad launch and a worse eighteen months are a few hundred programmers, artists,
designers and testers who took a swing at something ambitious, under a studio
that a workers’ union spent that whole time accusing of crunch and, at one
point, unlawful staff monitoring. The IWGB grievance was not about metascores.
It was about how the people inside were treated on the way down.
And the timing lands like a bruise on a bruise. This is the same month
Bethesda lost more than fifty developers
off Elder Scrolls 6 as part of Microsoft’s cuts. Different company, different
cause, same week, same grim little ritual of watching talented people update
their headline to “open to work.” When it is the giants and the scrappy
independents both at once, it stops feeling like bad luck and starts feeling
like weather.
There is a version of games writing that would tell you what this Means For
The Industry now, with a capital everything. We are not going to do that,
because nobody actually knows, and the people who tell you they do are usually
selling something. What we will say is smaller and truer. MindsEye was a bad
game. The studio that made it is gone. Neither of those facts should feel
satisfying, and if the second one does, that says more about the last few
years of layoff fatigue than it does about the work.
Play something good this week. Ideally something a small team poured itself
into and lived to talk about. There are still plenty of those, and they need
us more than the schadenfreude does.
