MindsEye Studio Faces Lawsuit Over Secret Employee Monitoring Software

Build a Rocket Boy is now fighting a legal battle over secret surveillance software, and the allegation cuts straight into the trust problem already hanging over MindsEye. Workers say management installed Teramind on company devices without properly telling staff what it could collect, then left basic questions unanswered as the studio tried to steady itself after a disastrous launch.

The IWGB Game Workers Union says 40 employees signed a collective grievance in March 2026, and workers initiated legal proceedings on April 21, 2026. Their complaint says Teramind was removed only after that grievance went in, but the company still has not explained what data was collected, how it was stored, or why the software was there in the first place. Teramind’s own materials describe features such as keystroke logging and screen playback, which is exactly the kind of tooling that turns ordinary productivity tracking into something far more invasive when staff are working from home.

The union has escalated the dispute through ACAS and the Information Commissioner’s Office, and that is where this stops being just another studio spat. The ICO says employers can monitor staff only if they can justify it and have a lawful basis. In a business built on remote collaboration, that matters. If employees believe management is watching them without clear notice, the damage lands everywhere, from morale to retention to the ability to ship patch work on time.

Build a Rocket Boy is not a tiny indie outfit that can shrug off a rough patch. Leslie Benzies, the former president of Rockstar North, founded the Edinburgh studio, and it raised $110 million in Series D funding in January 2024. MindsEye launched on June 10, 2025, for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S, but the numbers were brutal. The game finished with Metacritic scores of 39 on PC and 28 on PS5, making the reaction impossible to spin as anything but a collapse.

Since then, the fallout has kept widening. Build a Rocket Boy has already begun a 45-day redundancy consultation process, and in March 2026 it said more layoffs were coming. Mark Gerhard has publicly blamed organised espionage and criminal sabotage for the game’s problems, and in April 2026 he said MindsEye would receive a new mission that would share evidence of that alleged sabotage. That is the kind of internal chaos that leaves players wondering whether a studio can actually support the game it sold them, or whether the next patch is just another casualty of a company trying to survive its own launch.