In the past week, an undetermined number of Build a Rocket Boy staff have been laid off from the MindsEye developer, marking the third time in the past year that the studio has made staff redundant. However, while the number of employees affected is currently unknown, sources familiar with the restructuring tell Kotaku that roughly 170 members at the studio have been affected by the layoffs, bringing the total number of staff at the studio down to somewhere around 80 employees.
While Build a Rocket Boy has yet to publicly announce the layoffs, several staff members have made posts on LinkedIn confirming that they’re no longer with the studio, including James Tyler (Technical Level Designer), Tom Cross (Audio Designer), Gary Iain Gough (QA Analyst), and Leah Philpot (Level Designer). The studio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Likewise, several members of Build a Rocket Boy’s social media team confirmed in posts on the MindsEye Discord that their roles at the studio will be ending this week. “Just popping in to share that tomorrow (May 5th) will be my last working day with BARB,” stated Digital Marketing Manager George Jons-Clothier. “It has been an absolute pleasure and a genuine honor to be part of this community. You folks are some of the kindest, most welcoming, talented, and passionate people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing and have made every day working on MindsEye feel meaningful and fun.”
Two separate sources confirmed to Kotaku that as many as 170 employees across the company have been affected. This follows two rounds of layoffs at the studio, alongside the closure of Build A Rocket Boy France in March of this year. Co-CEO Mark Gerhard blamed the most recent round of cuts at Build a Rocket Boy on “organized espionage and corporate sabotage” in a post on LinkedIn.
It’s unclear where this leaves the studio moving forward. While it has gestured at ambitions of a Cyberpunk 2077 2.0-style turnaround for MindsEye, the recent Blacklist update left players unimpressed. The open-world shooter was supposed to be just one of many worlds that would exist in a new, high-graphical-fidelity user-generated content platform that Build a Rocket Boy was working on called Everywhere.
“Those guys were working really hard and it didn’t pan out how they expected, and how we wished either,” Hakan Abrak, CEO of IO Interactive, which initially distributed MindsEye, said this week.