MindsEye Developer Build a Rocket Boy Hit With Third Round of Layoffs in a Year

It never ends. Build a Rocket Boy, the beleaguered Edinburgh-based developer behind MindsEye, has reportedly been hit with yet another wave of redundancies, marking the third time in under a year the studio has had to let people go, according to Kotaku.

Around 170 staff have reportedly been impacted. The studio now sits at approximately 80 remaining employees. Build a Rocket Boy has not publicly commented on the situation.

The news broke through LinkedIn, where a number of affected staff began posting about the cuts. Senior game designer James Tyler and audio designer Tom Cross are among those who've confirmed they've been let go, referencing "the latest redundancies." Several members of the community team also broke the news themselves, posting directly in the official MindsEye Discord.

A Year of Mounting Damage

This is the third time Build a Rocket Boy has gone through this. The first wave hit shortly after MindsEye's June 2025 launch, when around 300 UK staff received at-risk emails. Over 250 people ultimately lost their jobs in that initial round.

What followed was pretty damning. Staff, past and present, united in an open letter to company leadership that called out what they described as "one of the worst video game launches this decade." Months of crunch, burnout, and what former analyst Ben Newbon described as "systemic mistreatment, mismanagement, and mishandling of the redundancy process." The letter was a direct rebuttal to studio leadership's insistence that MindsEye's failure was the result of orchestrated external sabotage, not internal dysfunction. A second round of cuts followed in March 2026.

Timing Couldn't Be Worse

The cruel irony here is the timing. These redundancies come just a week after the arrival of MindsEye's 'Blacklisted' update, a new mission delivered through the game's user-generated content platform, Arcadia. It was positioned as the start of a comeback bid for the title, and studio management had claimed the mission would contain evidence of the alleged sabotage they say derailed the game ahead of launch.

A comeback. With 80 staff left.

At the time of writing, six people are currently playing MindsEye on Steam. Six.

Whether the studio has any realistic path forward from here is genuinely hard to say. What's clear is that the people caught in these cuts are real workers who spent real time building something, whatever you think of how the game turned out or how leadership handled its aftermath.