MindsEye’s collapse isn’t the work of saboteurs—it’s the result of leadership that ignored its own team. The studio behind Build a Rocket Boy (BaRB), already infamous for its disastrous 2025 launch, is now facing an existential crisis. With co-CEO Leslie Benzies on temporary leave and mass layoffs underway, former employees paint a damning picture of a culture where top-down demands stifled creativity and stability. The question now isn’t just whether BaRB can recover—it’s whether it ever should.
At the heart of the problem is a pattern of leadership decisions that prioritized vanity features over polish. Developers describe Benzies as fixated on last-minute additions—what they privately dubbed ‘Leslies’*—that derailed testing and quality assurance. One former lead data analyst, Ben Newbon, called it a death spiral: *‘If management had focused on tightening everything up, the game could have worked. Instead, they kept throwing extra stuff on it—even a month before launch.’ The result? A game so bug-riddled it earned a Metacritic score of 37, the lowest of 2025, and a player backlash that forced refunds and Reddit outrage.
The damage wasn’t just technical. Employees allege Benzies fostered a toxic environment where criticism was dismissed as sabotage. ‘We were told there were saboteurs inside and outside the company trying to take us down,’ recalled one developer. ‘But the real sabotage was leadership refusing to trust the people who built the game.’ Another former staffer framed it bluntly: ‘They crushed their own talent under the yoke of appeasing a single person at the very top.’*
Even those who believed in BaRB’s potential now question its survival. *‘We had hundreds of talented professionals working on this,’ said a former developer. ‘If Leslie had listened to them, this could have been a hit. But the fundamental changes kept coming—until it was impossible to make a good game in the time we had.’ Newbon was more blunt: ‘They don’t know how to run a game studio. They don’t know how to run a business.’*
Now, with over half the studio laid off and Benzies’ leadership in question, the writing may be on the wall. A temporary leave for Benzies—described by co-CEO Mark Gerhard as a chance to *‘recharge’*—feels less like recovery and more like a last-ditch effort to salvage a sinking ship. *‘Even if they fix all the bugs,’ Newbon warned, ‘it’s still an extremely boring game. Leadership doesn’t listen. And now, there’s no team left to listen to.’*
The studio’s claims of a $1.1 million smear campaign pale beside the internal evidence: a culture where micromanagement replaced collaboration, where last-minute demands replaced testing, and where trust in employees was nonexistent. For BaRB, the real sabotage wasn’t external—it was self-inflicted.
*Build a Rocket Boy remains on shelves, though updates have slowed to a trickle. With MindsEye’s future uncertain, players and former employees alike are left wondering: Is this the end of a studio that lost sight of what made it great—or just the beginning of a much larger collapse?
