There are bad games that disappear just a few weeks after release, and then there are cases where the development process becomes more interesting to follow than the product itself. MindsEye ended up belonging to the second group, and since it hit stores in June 2025, virtually everything surrounding it has attracted more attention than what Build a Rocket Boy actually managed to create: extremely low scores, technical problems, layoffs, accusations from management and, now, reports that Leslie Benzies' studio may be closing its doors.It's an especially strange story because the expectations did not come from nowhere. Benzies spent decades at Rockstar North and played a major role in the development of several Grand Theft Auto games, including GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, GTA IV and GTA V. When he left Rockstar and founded Build a Rocket Boy, there was genuine curiosity about what someone with that résumé would do with the freedom to build his own company.It took years for the results to take shape. Build a Rocket Boy grew, unveiled the ambitious Everywhere and later turned MindsEye into a standalone release. The problem was that the game that eventually reached the market was far removed from what people expected from a production associated with Benzies' track record. MindsEye currently holds Metacritic averages of just 39 on PC and 29 on PS5, with recurring criticism aimed at its flawed artificial intelligence, performance, bugs, combat and mission structure.Up to that point, we're talking about a commercial and creative failure like so many others the industry has seen. What made the MindsEye case different was Build a Rocket Boy's difficulty in simply acknowledging the scale of the problem and reorganizing its plans accordingly.When Persistence Is No Longer EnoughThe company could have taken a relatively familiar path: admit that the release had fallen short of expectations, fix what it could, scale back its operations and try to rebuild players' trust with a future project. Instead, MindsEye continued to be treated for months as something that could still be salvaged, even as the team responsible for that recovery continued to shrink.Build a Rocket Boy released updates, made a version with some of the content available for free and continued producing new missions. The effort to improve a game after launch is not something that should be criticized in itself. No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 are obvious examples of games that had troubled launches and managed to rebuild their reputations. The difference is that recovering a game requires resources, internal stability and, above all, a strong enough foundation to justify the investment.In MindsEye's case, while the studio persisted with its recovery effort, employees continued losing their jobs. In October 2025, 93 current and former employees signed an open letter accusing Build a Rocket Boy's leadership of a lack of transparency, mishandling layoffs and excessive overtime in the run-up to launch. According to the workers, there were periods when eight additional hours per week became mandatory during the four months before release.Source: ReproductionFurther rounds of cuts continued in 2026. In May, sources who spoke to Kotaku estimated that approximately 170 people had been affected in that stage of the restructuring, leaving the studio with around 80 employees.This is where I find it difficult to separate the decision to persist with MindsEye from the company's leadership. There is something admirable about not immediately abandoning a project that has failed, especially when hundreds of people spent years working on it. But business persistence cannot be measured solely by the number of updates a game continues to receive. It's also necessary to ask how much the effort is costing and who is paying for it.The Problem Was Never Just MindsEyeManagement's public stance made the situation even more complicated. Instead of focusing its communication exclusively on the game's problems and the measures needed to fix them, co-CEO Mark Gerhard said the company was investigating alleged criminal activity that had taken place during the launch, mentioning “organized espionage” and “corporate sabotage.” Build a Rocket Boy later linked the Blacklisted mission to the allegations, saying the content would help present some of the evidence to the community.It would be wrong to claim that these accusations are false without access to the investigations cited by the company. The issue is something else: even if external factors harmed MindsEye, they do not explain what players actually received. Sabotage alone does not explain a Metacritic average of 29. Nor does it address the criticism of the artificial intelligence, mission design, performance or bugs, or the allegations later made by the workers themselves.Now, just over a year after launch, employees have once again announced their departures. Kotaku sources say that Build a Rocket Boy is permanently shutting down its operations, while other reports indicate that the company could continue to exist as a legal entity even without its current staff structure. The company has not yet issued a definitive statement clarifying its future, so some caution is necessary when describing the situation as a closure.If this really is the end of Build a Rocket Boy as we know it, I believe MindsEye will remain an interesting case precisely because there was time to change course. The studio tried to fix the game, released additional content and continued defending the project, but none of that appears to have solved the structural problems surrounding it.Perhaps that's the hardest part to accept when so much anticipation surrounds a production. Leslie Benzies' résumé justified the initial interest in MindsEye, but it could not guarantee that his new studio would repeat Rockstar's success. Likewise, investing years and millions in a project does not mean that continuing to invest in it is necessarily the right decision.There is merit in trying to salvage a bad game. The line is crossed when saving that game begins consuming a company that is already losing people, resources and trust. If the reports about Build a Rocket Boy's closure are confirmed, the discussion around MindsEye will probably shift to something much more basic: at what point should someone have realized that persisting was no longer solving the problem.
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