Build a Rocket Boy hits third layoff round after MindsEye turmoil

Build a Rocket Boy has cut about 170 jobs, leaving roughly 80 people at the studio and pushing MindsEye deeper into a post-launch collapse that now spans multiple teams and countries. The latest round hit technical level design, audio design, QA, level design and digital marketing, with staff members including James Tyler, Tom Cross, Gary Iain Gough, Leah Philpot and George Jons-Clothier posting that they were out. Jons-Clothier said May 5 would be his last working day at the company.

This was the studio’s third layoff round in less than a year. MindsEye launched on June 10, 2025, and the trouble that followed never stayed confined to one department. In June 2025, Build a Rocket Boy began a 45-day consultation process tied to potential large-scale redundancies under UK law, when reporting said the company had about 300 employees in its UK office and another 200 developers abroad. By October, more than 90 current and former staff had signed an open letter organized with the IWGB Game Workers union, accusing the studio of forced overtime, poor transparency and mishandled redundancies.

For Nintendo employees, the pattern matters as much as the headcount. The disciplines that took the hardest hits here, QA, audio, level design and marketing, are the same functions that often absorb the most strain when a game ships badly and the work shifts from making the product to saving it. Once launch performance goes off the rails, the cuts do not stay at the edges. They move into the people who are supposed to steady the game after ship, which is why post-launch planning, scope control and quality gates are not abstract management habits. They are labor protections in practice.

The studio’s contraction also reached beyond Edinburgh and the wider United Kingdom. Kotaku reported that Build A Rocket Boy France in Montpellier had already been closed or placed into liquidation earlier in 2026, underscoring how fast a company built around one ambitious release can shrink when that release underperforms. MindsEye was quickly met with player refunds on PlayStation 5 and a mostly negative Steam reception, and in March 2026 co-CEO Mark Gerhard said the studio had evidence of “organized espionage and corporate sabotage” affecting the launch. IO Interactive chief Hakan Abrak said the team had worked hard, but the project did not pan out as hoped.

That is the warning inside this story. Studios can hire for ambition, but when the economics break, the unwinding is swift, and the workers left standing are often the ones closest to quality recovery. Nintendo’s slower release rhythm and insistence on polish look less like conservatism in moments like this and more like a hedge against the kind of unraveling that can turn a bad launch into a labor crisis.