A former Build A Rocket Boy developer has spoken out, calling the studio’s leadership “autocratic” and describing the workplace as toxic and creatively stifling.
Build A Rocket Boy (BARB), the studio led by former Rockstar North president Leslie Benzies, has been under fire for months now following the troubled launch of its first big game, MindsEye, which many called the biggest flop of 2025.
Promoted as a boundary-pushing narrative experience within the Everywhere platform, the title launched in June 2025 to poor reviews, major technical issues, and a flood of criticism from players and critics alike. Since then, the studio has faced serious internal changes, layoffs, and growing calls for accountability.
Now, a former developer who worked at the company for over two years has come forward publicly to share what it was like behind the scenes, and it doesn’t paint a good picture of life at the studio.
Former Build A Rocket Boy Employee Calls Studio’s Leadership “Autocratic”
In a LinkedIn post shared shortly after the BBC published its investigation into Build A Rocket Boy’s workplace issues, Killian M., who worked as a Content Designer at the company from February 2022 to April 2024, thanked colleagues who spoke up and echoed many of the concerns that have been shared online.
He said the experience left a lasting impression on him, particularly the way poor leadership affected both the people and the product.
According to Killian, “unhappy workers in an autocratic workplace” led to “bad quality work,” and the result was a cycle of high turnover, lower productivity, and the loss of vital knowledge within the team. He blamed much of this on a management structure that gave all creative control to “one unaccountable CEO,” referring to Benzies without naming him directly.
He also said that the “incredibly talented” people he worked with were held back by a negative and toxic environment where “so many great ideas… were shot down by management.”
“[Team’s] talent was suppressed by a negative and toxic workplace where most control and creative decisions were centralised in one unaccountable CEO,” he said.
He also expressed frustration over how much better MindsEye and Everywhere could have been if workers had been empowered to “collectively and democratically make creative decisions.” He praised the IWGB union and called for more game developers to unionize or create co-ops to take back control from “egotistical CEO[s] and uninformed shareholders.”
Check out the full comment below.
“So incredibly proud of all of my former colleagues who spoke out against the shocking working conditions at Build A Rocket Boy, where I worked for 2 and a half years.
“My time working there really reinforced my belief that a happy worker in a democratic workplace leads to better quality work, by experiencing over 2 years of the opposite – unhappy workers in an autocratic workplace often leading to bad quality work. The upshot of this is high turnover, low productivity, and a loss of embedded knowledge over many years.
“As mentioned in the BBC article, many of those I worked with were incredibly talented, but their talent was suppressed by a negative and toxic workplace where most control and creative decisions were centralised in one unaccountable CEO. I still often think about how fantastic Everywhere and Mindseye could be if only we as workers were empowered to collectively and democratically make creative decisions. There were *so many* great ideas which were shot down by management.
“I was proud to be a member of the IWGB – Independent Workers Union of Great Britain while living in the UK and working at BARB, and we must urgently unionise the games industry if we want any chance of it surviving – if things continue like this, the greed of any egotistical CEO and uninformed shareholders will drive the industry we love into the ground.
We must also push for the creation of gamedev worker-owned and democratic organisations (gamedev co-ops), where the experts in game development (actual game developers) collectively manage the development process. That allows for work to be done proactively instead of reactively, and leads to much more efficient and innovative games development processes.”
Killian’s post adds another layer to the growing mountain of criticism facing BARB. Earlier this month, 93 current and former employees signed an open letter alleging mandatory overtime, mismanagement, and mishandled layoffs.
What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
