Former employees of Build a Rocket Boy gathered outside the studio's headquarters in Leith, Scotland on Saturday to protest the company's decision to host an all-expenses-paid fan playtest, even as hundreds of staff have lost their jobs over the past year. The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) organized the action, with attendees including former workers from both Build a Rocket Boy and Rockstar Games. If you want context on what the studio has been building, check out Vampires: Bloodlord Rising for a sense of how different studios approach community engagement.
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Flying in fans while staff walk out the door
The IWGB's Game Workers Branch put the situation plainly. The studio flew fans in to do playtesting work that would normally fall to professional QA staff, at a company where the union estimates more than 400 employees have been laid off since MindsEye launched in June 2025. The branch chair called it "a waste of money, and a kick in the teeth for the fired workers who are seeing fans brought in to do jobs that would otherwise have been theirs."
Here's the thing: the optics of funding travel and accommodation for fan testers while former employees are still dealing with redundancy fallout is hard to spin any other way. The game can be tested online. There was no technical reason to fly anyone in.
What former employee Isaac Hudd said at the protest
Former employee Isaac Hudd delivered remarks at the protest that went well beyond the playtest itself. He laid out a timeline of what he described as a year-long pattern of mismanagement, starting with MindsEye's launch and the silence from co-CEOs Mark Gerhard and Leslie Benzies that followed.
"Instead of taking responsibility, instead of reassuring or commiserating with the people who made their game, the co-CEOs of this company went silent," Hudd said. "On their eventual return, they announced layoffs. What followed was three months of lies, veiled threats and ultimately the callous removal of at least 250 employees."
Hudd also criticized the Blacklisted DLC, which the studio released partly to present its "evidence" of alleged corporate sabotage, calling it "a leather-clad sexist stereotype" that received deserved public scorn. He pointed to the studio secretly installing monitoring software on employee PCs, an entire branch of the company going bankrupt, and the decision to hire a fan from the studio's Discord instead of a recently laid-off community manager.
"By taking away our livelihoods, they gave us something they never planned on: motivation, fury," Hudd said.
The conspiracy narrative that didn't land
After MindsEye's troubled launch, Gerhard publicly blamed the game's commercial failure on what he described as "criminal activity" including "organised espionage and corporate sabotage." The Blacklisted DLC was positioned as a way to share that evidence with players. Public reception was skeptical at best.
What most players miss in coverage like this is how unusual it is for a studio to release story content specifically to argue its own innocence. It didn't shift the conversation in Build a Rocket Boy's favor, and the subsequent layoffs continued regardless.
The studio has also reportedly installed surveillance software on employee machines, a claim that led to legal action from staff. That situation remains unresolved.
Where this goes from here
The IWGB protest signals that pressure on Build a Rocket Boy from organized labor is not going away. Hudd made clear the goal extends beyond BARB itself, framing the action as a message to the broader UK games industry: "We, alongside the IWGB, are fighting to show not just BARB, not just Rockstar, but every games company in the UK, that mistreatment will get you nowhere."
With MindsEye still technically active and the studio's future direction unclear, the coming weeks will likely determine whether Build a Rocket Boy continues operating in any meaningful form. For players keeping tabs on the wider games industry and labor developments, the gaming guides hub covers the broader context as the situation develops.
