Build A Rocket Boy spied on its own staff and still couldn't ship

Build A Rocket Boy is dead. Not "restructuring," not "refocusing on core priorities" — dead. On September 16, employees started posting the LinkedIn eulogies, sources confirmed to Kotaku the company is winding down for good, and the studio's own head of talent acquisition announced he'd be sticking around to help HR turn off the lights.

This is the studio founded by Leslie Benzies, the ex-Rockstar producer who was supposed to out-GTA GTA. What he actually delivered was MindsEye — and one of the most instructive management case studies of the decade, in the sense that a plane crash is instructive.

The résumé speaks for itself

Let's review what this company accomplished in fifteen months:

• Shipped 2025's worst-reviewed game. MindsEye launched June 10, 2025, and finished the year with a Metascore of 28 — dead last on Metacritic, nine points below the runner-up.
• Achieved Cyberpunk-tier refunds. PlayStation started refunding MindsEye purchases on the PS Store, an honor it previously reserved for Cyberpunk 2077 at its lowest.
• Hit a player count you can seat at a dinner party. A month after launch, concurrent players dropped below 20. Not 20 thousand. Twenty.
• Fired 300 people weeks after launch, then cut roughly 170 of the remaining 250 in May 2026 — while publicly promising a turnaround.

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The part where they bugged the laptops

Here's where it stops being a sad story about a flopped game and becomes something weirder. After the launch went sideways, co-CEO Mark Gerhard reportedly held a leaked internal meeting in which he blamed a YouTube management agency for "sabotaging" MindsEye — a real theory a real executive said out loud — and announced that "enhanced cybersecurity software" had been installed on employees' work devices.

That software was Teramind, a monitoring tool, and staff say nobody asked their consent. Forty workers signed a collective grievance, and the IWGB union took the company to legal proceedings, escalating to the UK's data-protection regulator over software the union says went as far as

"recording individuals in their homes and without their consent."

BARB quietly uninstalled Teramind after the grievance, but — per the union — never explained what data it collected or why. So: no answers, no game people wanted, and a workforce that had to lawyer up to find out whether their employer was watching them fold laundry.

Note the priorities here. The studio could not ship functioning traffic AI, but it could ship workplace surveillance to hundreds of endpoints. Deployment was never the problem. The product was.

Raising the green banner

The end, when it came, was announced the way everything at BARB was announced: on LinkedIn, by people who deserved better. Talent partner Dan Hawkins wrote,

"With a very heavy heart I raise my green banner,"

adding that he'd see the company through to the very end from inside the HR department. IWGB vice-chair Ben Newbon, whose union spent a year fighting BARB over redundancies, blacklisting allegations, and the spying, told Rock Paper Shotgun the studio had been

"a company that we think has been slowly spiralling for a long time."

The union says it will keep pursuing its claims against management — including the redundancy and blacklisting filings that, if successful, could cost BARB millions it presumably no longer has. MindsEye, meanwhile, is still listed for sale, at a discount.

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