Build A Rocket Boy, the Edinburgh-based studio founded by former Grand Theft Auto V producer Leslie Benzies, is reportedly shutting down. Multiple developers have posted publicly on LinkedIn announcing their departures, with at least one post directly implying the studio is wrapping up for good.
The green banner goes up
The phrase "raising the green banner" is a LinkedIn convention used by developers to signal they are out of work and looking for new roles. Right now, Build A Rocket Boy employees are posting it in numbers.
Principal talent acquisition partner and HR operations lead Dan Hawkins was among the most direct. "With a very heavy heart I raise my green banner, along with the rest of my colleagues at Build a Rocket Boy," he wrote, adding that he would be "seeing BARB through till the very end, helping wrap things up here in the HR department." That last part is hard to read as anything other than a studio wind-down.
Technical level designer Robert Meek followed with his own post, describing his time at BARB as "an experience I will never forget" and saying it helped him "rapidly grow as a designer." Production QA analyst Cameron Deaves, senior QA analyst Elizabet Tyaneva, and release manager Michaela Emslie have all posted similarly. The pattern is consistent enough that this does not look like a standard round of redundancies.
A troubled run from the start
MindsEye launched in 2025 to a reception that was, to put it plainly, brutal. The game landed at the bottom of Metacritic's annual rankings just six days after release, sitting below over 180 other titles that year. For a studio led by someone with Benzies' pedigree, having produced one of the best-selling games ever made in Grand Theft Auto V, that was a significant fall.
The problems ran deeper than the game itself. Reports emerged of what developers described as "unbearable levels of overtime," mishandled layoffs, and a toxic internal culture. Then came the stranger chapter: Benzies reportedly had monitoring software installed on developer machines in a hunt for internal "saboteurs" he blamed for the game's poor launch. He later took a leave of absence as the situation escalated.
Layoffs hit the studio multiple times in the months following MindsEye's release. Each wave was followed by more developer statements and more public criticism of how the situation was being handled. The latest wave appears to be the last.
What this means for the people involved
Here's the thing: studio closures are never just business news. There are real developers behind every one of these LinkedIn posts, people who spent years building a game that did not land the way anyone hoped. Whatever the management failures were, the designers, QA analysts, and producers posting right now did not make those calls.
The talent pool coming out of Build A Rocket Boy is experienced. Many of these developers worked on a large-scale open-world project from the ground up, which is genuinely valuable experience even when the final product does not reflect it. The games industry is not short of studios that need people who know how to build at that scale.
For players still active in Rockstar's open-world games, the GTA Online Kortz Center Heist setup guide and the rest of the Grand Theft Auto V guide collection are worth bookmarking while the industry processes what happened at BARB and what comes next for its former team.
