Laid-off MindsEye developers protest outside Build a Rocket Boy's Edinburgh office over all-expenses-paid fan playtest

Laid-off Build a Rocket Boy developers and IWGB union members are picketing outside the studio's Edinburgh office this Saturday, July 11, to protest a fan playtest event the studio is funding while hundreds of workers have lost their jobs over the past year.

BARB announced the event on its Discord back in June, promising to fly a small group of community members to Edinburgh, cover two nights of hotel accommodation, and fly them home — all to try out new MindsEye features and give direct feedback. The IWGB, which is already in active legal disputes with both BARB and Rockstar, says the studio is spending thousands on the event after laying off over 400 staff across multiple rounds of redundancies. The most recent cut, in May, shed another 170 employees. The union also alleges the studio installed invasive surveillance software called Teramind on worker devices without consent, engaged in union blacklisting, and mishandled redundancies — IWGB launched legal action over the data privacy violations in April. Around 20 people are expected at Saturday's protest, including former BARB staff and supporters, but not current employees.

MindsEye has been a slow-motion disaster since launch. The game — originally conceived as part of Everywhere, Leslie Benzies's ambitious Roblox-for-adults platform — shipped to poor reviews and catastrophic performance issues. BARB attempted a relaunch with the Blacklisted update, but it barely registered: the game's 24-hour peak concurrent player count on Steam sits at just 48. Studio leadership, including Benzies and co-CEO Mark Gerhard, blamed the failure on internal saboteurs and alleged organised corporate espionage — claims serious enough that BARB even released a campaign mission dramatising the alleged sabotage. In October last year, 93 current and former employees signed an open letter accusing studio leadership of longstanding disrespect and mistreatment.

The IWGB framed the playtest as handing work — both paid and unpaid — from professional staff to fans during a sector-wide jobs crisis, and noted that BARB recently replaced longstanding community team members with a player hire, apparently without a formal interview process. BARB's own statement described the event as part of its ongoing commitment to its Arcadia game creation system and called community feedback its most important input. What the studio plans to show at the playtest, and whether any of it can reverse MindsEye's fortunes, remains to be seen.