Build A Rocket Boy, the studio behind MindsEye, laid off roughly 170 of its 250 employees in a devastating restructuring. The cuts represent a 68 percent reduction in headcount, leaving the developer with approximately 80 staff members.
Affected employees confirmed the layoffs across LinkedIn and Discord. The timing compounds the studio's challenges. Build A Rocket Boy had recently promised a turnaround, but the massive reduction undermines those statements and signals serious operational strain.
MindsEye, the studio's flagship project, now faces an uncertain future with such a depleted team. The game was positioning itself for growth, but the cuts suggest the project encountered either commercial headwinds or funding constraints that forced drastic action.
This layoff joins an ongoing wave of studio shutdowns and mass restructurings across the gaming industry. Major publishers and independent developers have cut thousands of jobs over the past two years as market conditions tightened and post-pandemic spending normalized. Build A Rocket Boy's cuts are among the most severe in percentage terms, hitting roughly two-thirds of the company.
The move raises questions about MindsEye's development timeline and the studio's ability to maintain momentum with a skeleton crew. Retaining institutional knowledge, maintaining team cohesion, and meeting production schedules all become exponentially harder after cuts of this magnitude. Whether MindsEye can recover depends entirely on whether the remaining 80 employees possess the core skills needed to push the project forward.
Build A Rocket Boy has not issued an official statement detailing the restructuring's scope or rationale. The studio's silence, combined with the dramatic headcount reduction, suggests the decision came suddenly to most staff and reflects a company in crisis management mode rather than controlled optimization.
THE TAKEAWAY: A 68 percent workforce reduction signals deeper problems at Build A Rocket Boy than a simple restructuring, threatening