The developer behind a panned GTA clone is permanently closing down according to reports, as more employees are laid off.
In the early 2000s, GTA clones were in abundance, between the likes of True Crime: Streets Of LA, The Getaway, Saints Row, and many others.
Nowadays, far fewer developers are attempting to replicate Rockstar’s brand of shooting and driving in an open world sandbox. One of the only recent contenders was 2025’s Mindseye, from developer Build A Rocket Boy, a studio founded by former president of Rockstar Games, Leslie Benzies.
Benzies’ connection to Rockstar may have been a marketing boon, but the game itself was terrible. On review aggregate site Metacritic, it currently has a score of 39 from 16 reviews, while the user score from players is even lower at 2.7.
The game’s failure has led to multiple rounds of layoffs at the studio over the past year, and some employees have even taken legal action against management, over claims they were being spied on through ‘invasive surveillance software’.
It all seems such a terrible waste as many of the developers were talented veterans of Rockstar North and other respected studios, with the management team blamed for most of the problems.
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Now, several remaining employees at the studio have announced, on LinkedIn, that they have been let go from Build A Rocket Boy. Production QA analyst Cameron Deaves shared that his time at the studio is ‘coming to an end’, along with level designer Liam Shannon and several others.
Dan Hawkins, the studio’s principal talent acquisition partner and HR operations, implied the rest of the team had been laid off too. ‘With a very heavy heart I raise my green [LinkedIn Open To Work] banner, along with the rest of my colleagues at Build A Rocket Boy,’ he wrote. ‘I am ‘Open To Work’ actively looking for a new adventure.’
While Build A Rocket Boy have not announced the studio’s closure, Kotaku reports that the developer is ‘permanently closing its doors’ following these layoffs. GameCentral has reached out to Build A Rocket Boy for comment.
It’s unclear how many people have been impacted by these layoffs, but it’s believed the studio had around 100 employees left following the last round in May this year. At its peak, the studio is reported to have had around 800 employees in total, which is a lot even compared to most major developers.
According to sources at IGN, Benzies is said to have blamed the failure of Mindseye on unspecified ‘internal and external saboteurs’, along with other factors.
Similarly, the studio’s co-CEO, Mark Gerhard, said there was a ‘concerted effort’ to ‘trash the game and the studio’, suggesting people were using spam bots to post negative comments. He never explained why anyone would want to do that though.
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