Can Build A Rocket Boy save itself?

The latest twist in the MindsEye story came last week when staff at the Edinburgh-based studio discovered that the company had installed surveillance software on their PCs without their knowledge.

According to Slack messages seen by GamesIndustry.biz, workers at the studio discovered that management had installed monitoring software called Teramind on their machines without their knowledge or consent. This was only discovered after staff noticed in January that their hardware was slower than usual, impacting the performance of software essential to game development, such as Maya.

Build A Rocket Boy (BARB) management only admitted to installing this software after the fact and asked staff to sign an updated IT privacy policy.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Patrick Rennie, a partner at Wiggin and head of the law firm’s data protection team, said that while employers are “generally” allowed to monitor their staff, they must adhere to certain guidelines: “They need to comply with data protection, including that monitoring is reasonable, proportionate and transparent.”

In an impromptu all-hands video call in the last week of January, seen by GamesIndustry.biz and also reported by Insider Gaming, co-CEO Mark Gerhard described Teramind as “enhanced cybersecurity software”. He said that while management trusts most of its staff, “it’s the 1% that is the problem”, echoing earlier comments from co-CEO Leslie Benzies about “saboteurs” inside the company. Gerhard said that BARB hoped to remove the tech “within three months”, with the caveat that this was “directly linked to MindsEye’s success”.

On the same call, Gerhard claimed, without evidence, that “a very big American company” had spent over €1 million in 2025, “committing criminal activity against BARB”.

This, he claimed, took the form of paying UK influencer agency Ritual Network, as well as three unnamed journalists and some BARB employees, to damage the company. All of these parties, Gerhard said, were set to receive in-person criminal complaints “shortly”.

Gerhard previously claimed there was a “concerted effort” to attack the studio before the game’s release, after pre-release criticism of the game’s technical performance which he claimed was financed by unnamed parties.

One of the YouTubers Ritual represents is a prominent anonymous personality who has conducted in-depth reporting on BARB and MindsEye, including interviews with studio staff. When the YouTuber asked Gerhard about potential legal action in the game’s Discord server, the executive sent a message that “serves as a formal cease and desist” demanding that they “stop all activities” related to publishing information about BARB.

This post also featured the anonymous influencer’s real name. These messages have since been deleted by server moderators.

In a statement to GamesIndustry.biz, Ritual Network firmly denied the accusations levelled against it by Gerhard and said that it was not involved in any legal action.

“Ritual Network is a creator support platform and is not involved in the matter you referenced,” the company said. “We are not aware of any legitimate legal action involving Ritual Network and have not been provided with any evidence supporting these claims. Any suggestion that Ritual Network is connected to these allegations is incorrect.”

In an email following the all-hands, Gerhard told staff that co-CEO Leslie Benzies, who recently denied allegations of sexual assault after being named by an unidentified person in the recently-released Epstein files, was on “a well-earned temporary leave to recharge after more than a year of working around the clock”.

Gerhard continued: “He has our deepest gratitude, and with the leadership team and your support, I will guide us forward” before signing off as CEO.

A week later, the company put out a press release for a major MindsEye patch that launched on February 4, describing it as “a new phase of ongoing development”. Gerhard told staff in the January all-hands meeting that it was “going to be our defining chapter”. At the time of writing, 28 people are playing the game on Steam, and the title has a peak CCU of 65 people for the last 24 hours, per SteamDB data.

GamesIndustry.biz has approached BARB for comment.

Eye of the storm

Gerhard’s recent claims are the latest twist in the long and troubled development of MindsEye, which first came to a head when the game launched in June of 2025. As the date approached, there was a contrasting mood within the studio. Many staff were burnt out and disillusioned after working long hours to get the game ready for release, knowing that it wasn’t ready for launch, while management was wildly optimistic.

Former employees describe an atmosphere of “toxic positivity” from the top brass. Staff were told that the title was set to receive a positive reception. One former worker thought that the game would manage five or six out of ten “at best.”

Then, two members of the management team quit a week before the game released. The launch itself was a disaster. Reviewers and consumers savaged the game. There were myriad technical issues. The player count on Steam plummeted.

“Following release, I mostly saw confusion; most people were expecting a better reception,” one former worker said. “As time passed, reality sank in: MindsEye had flopped, and people started coming to terms with the fact that the game they spent years working so hard on had fallen completely flat.”

Another ex-member of staff added: “Honestly, I’ve never seen hope dashed like that.”

“Leslie didn’t seem to take any blame for the game’s launch. It was genuinely offensive that he didn’t trust his own employees”

Former BARB employee

Two weeks later, at the end of June, the studio announced significant redundancies. On July 2, there was an internal call to discuss them with staff. This call, which leaked to the press and has been seen by GamesIndustry.biz, featured remarks by Benzies regarding saboteurs both inside and outside the studio trying to damage MindsEye. This echoed similar comments from Gerhard ahead of MindsEye’s launch, where the exec alluded to a “concerted effort” to “trash the game and the studio”.

“I’d hoped for more of an explanation about the layoffs and our company situation,” a former staffer said. “But instead, we’d been told there were saboteurs inside and outside the company trying to take us down. Leslie didn’t seem to take any blame for the game’s launch. It was genuinely offensive that he didn’t trust his own employees. The idea that we’d sabotage a game we’d spent countless hours working on was just rude to me.”

Rockstar problems

According to staff, problems at the studio started well before the game’s launch. When the company was founded, its focus was Everywhere, an MMO open-world building tool, internally described as “grown-up Roblox.” The vision drew significant investment from VC firms and NetEase, but staff say that this never really got off the ground.

The expectation was that Benzies’ name and recognition from his time at Rockstar would drive buzz and help attract community, but a splashy reveal at Gamescom in 2022 drew a relatively muted response, and the studio struggled to get players interested in Everywhere. A beta version launched, but struggled to retain players despite efforts to bring in creators with followings on similar platforms like Minecraft, Roblox and The Sims.

“Retention was awful,” said one employee. “There was very little to do. They ended up with this chicken and egg situation where no one was playing because there was nothing to do, and no one was creating anything because there was no one playing.”

The company’s focus shifted almost entirely to MindsEye, a project that initially was set to promote Everywhere. BARB sought out a publishing partner for MindsEye, ultimately securing a deal with Hitman maker IO Interactive.

Many staff attribute responsibility for BARB’s current predicament and the state of MindsEye when it launched to Leslie Benzies. Although the Rockstar veteran was very successful in attracting investment for the studio on the back of his previous track record – including a $110 million cash injection at the start of 2024 – staff say that he struggled to delegate responsibility and appeared to lack clarity in the vision for the game.

During the final months of MindsEye’s development, developers were regularly being asked to put in new features that had caught Benzies’ attention. There was even a category of task in BARB’s Jira for Leslie Benzies’ ideas; these always had to take priority, regardless of how workable they were.

“If management had concentrated on tightening everything up at that point, then it could have worked, but instead they kept on trying to throw extra stuff on it,” said former lead data analyst Ben Newbon.

“Leslie’s eye would be caught by something in particular and then insist this extra feature be added in, even like a month before launch. There wasn’t enough time to test those things and to get all the pieces in place to actually make it work without it breaking.”

Other staff spoke of micromanagement and a high-court mentality, supported by an “entourage” who did not wish to lose Benzies’ favour by contradicting him. “They crushed their own talent under the yoke of appeasing a single person at the very top,” said one.

Another believes that Benzies could have had a hit on his hands, had he only been prepared to listen to his staff.

“He may have had a winning formula if he’d have listened to the advice from the literal hundreds of fantastic, insanely talented, and hard-working industry professionals they spent so much time and money hiring,” they said. “We had so many fundamental changes to the game that it would’ve been impossible to make a good game in the time we had.”

Reaching for a reset

Where BARB goes from here is unclear. IWGB Game Workers is currently taking legal action against the studio over the mishandling of the redundancy process, and the union has published an open letter to BARB’s leadership signed by 93 current and former employees.

The latest update for MindsEye was presented as part of a “reset” that the firm is hoping will turn the game into a success. Former staff claim that BARB’s management is hoping that MindsEye undergoes a redemption arc similar to Cyberpunk 2077 or No Man’s Sky, both of which also struggled at launch but recovered after diligent patching resolved their technical problems. The studio is focused on delivering updates, but former staff are fatalistic about its prospects, pointing out that it never achieved a comparable level of pre-launch hype.

“They don’t know how to run a business. They don’t know how to run a game studio”

Ben Newbon

“Even if they had the best leadership in the world, there’s no way to bring this back,” Newbon told GamesIndustry.biz in the aftermath of the launch. “Even if they fix all of the bugs and technical issues, it’s still an extremely boring game. Leadership do not listen. Plus, they’ve culled over half the studio. They don’t know how to run a business. They don’t know how to run a game studio.”

A former staffer concluded: “I don’t think BARB survives this crisis. I believe the end is coming for BARB, and it’s not heralded by saboteurs, but by Mark and Leslie themselves.”